The library of St John’s College, Oxford, used to hold a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that bore a student’s penciled comment on the last page:

“First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.”

It had been written by Philip Larkin, who had studied English there in the 1940s.