155.232, and it never stayed put

There were four or five children every year who came in at lunch not to borrow anything but because the library was the one room in the building where nobody shouted. Denise called them the regulars. I gave this to two colleagues and to one parent, and the parent came back furious, which I took as a recommendation.

Cain is best on the American office and weakest on the science, where she wants the studies to say slightly more than they say. The Harvard Business School chapter could go entirely. But the section on children — the pretending, and the exhaustion of pretending — I recognised every line of it, and so would Mr Sowerby, who spent three decades being called aloof by people who had never once asked him a question.

My reservation is that it flatters. Anybody reading a book about introversion will place themselves on the good side of the ledger, and this one lets them. Still. It changed how I arranged the seating in the reading corner, and not much in the 150s ever did that for me.