'[Rose Macaulay's] library comprised chiefly old tomes from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which she read and re-read with absorbed delight, from Hakluyt to Addison... Her most cherished books were the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary inherited from her father. As the daughter of a don and a lover of words, she added her own marginal annotations to those pencilled in by George Macaulay'.