Art & Creativity Quote by Simon Raven

Raven’s triple-stacked “very” isn’t just emphasis; it’s a small act of comic violence against piety. He draws a clean line between scholarship as a living intelligence and “drudgery” as institutionalized self-harm, then refuses the moral blackmail that says serious minds must prove themselves through endurance. The sentence is built like a verdict: “Scholarship was one thing” (noble, elastic, even enjoyable), “drudgery another” (a separate category entirely), and then the swift, almost gleeful closing of the case. “Nothing would induce me” has the chill of an unbribable juror.

The subtext is about class and temperament as much as reading. Raven, a novelist with a patrician streak and a taste for ruthless social observation, is implicitly mocking a certain academic performance: the fetish of “making notes on” books no one loves, as if documentation were identical to understanding. His “let alone” is crucial; it demotes note-taking to the purest form of busywork, a bureaucratic ritual masquerading as intellect.

Contextually, it lands as a mid-century British complaint about credential culture, the postwar expansion of higher education, and the pressure to turn curiosity into a production line. Raven isn’t anti-learning; he’s anti-compulsion. The joke carries a dare: if your intellectual life requires hundreds of “very boring” books, the problem may not be your attention span. It may be the system’s idea of seriousness.