In this reflective piece, Karl Miller looks down the lens at an ancient world, once his own. He does so with the help of a memoir, "Rebecca's Vest," which he published much later, in the mid-1990s: a mid-term report in which he describes how he became a reader and about what he read. With the end of the term approaching, he offers a revised view of what it was to be a reader and a student after the Second World War. He concludes that over the last 50 years of literary culture in this country, creative activity was not deterred by the sometimes swaggering surge in literary criticism, pre-theory; nor has it been deterred by the more reasonable of theory's initiatives. The emphasis is still on profit and on the private ownership of the means of expression.