Second Chances and Top Novels

Under the curious headline here (on the BBC News website) is quite an interesting story: Cambridge University is going to use the clearing process to offer a second chance to students from 'deprived' backgrounds who narrowly miss getting a place on their initial application. As this is not a quota as such, and ethnic origin is not taken into account, it seems a sensible enough attempt to redress an undoubted imbalance. I knew things were bad, but I was startled to read that these days only two per cent of Cambridge students are white working-class. The percentage was certainly very much higher in my day – but there was a reason for that. As Charles Moore remarked in last week's Spectator:
'The truth is that no policy ever devised has seriously challenged the dominance of hereditary elites at Oxford and Cambridge, except for one. This was a thing called the grammar school, but you don't hear much about it these days.'

On a quite unrelated matter (and with a double tip of the hat to Dave Lull and Frank Wilson), I've been reading about a new list of the 100 Top Novels. What makes this one interesting is that the sole criterion is aggregate library holdings. And the most widely held novel in libraries worldwide is... Don Quixote. I must admit I was surprised (and I wonder if the figures include all published versions of the title, including abridgements, children's editions, graphic novels, etc.). The literary monument that is the full and unabridged Don Quixote is surely one of the least read of all the great novels (and I suspect Moby-Dick runs it fairly close). Everybody 'knows' Don Quixote, but how many have read it in its entirety? I know I haven't (nor, to my deeper shame, have I ever read all through Moby-Dick). Strange that a Great Unread like Don Quixote should be the book most frequently found on library shelves... The rest of the top five are much less surprising – Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Even I've read all of those.