"[During a party one night] Aldous Huxley held forth on a string of topics at the dinner table. On every topic, he knew all there was to know. But a fellow-guest noticed that all the topics began with the same letter. Suspicious, the fellow-guest retired to the library and checked up. Huxley had been quoting verbatim from the Encyclopedia Britannica."
["You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he'd been reading," Bertrand Russell concurred. "One day it would be Alps, Andes, and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath."]
Sources
New Yorker, March 17, 2003, p. 143;
