"Classic- a book which people praise and don't read."
The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner carried me through many a mile in my life: "Novelist Alan Sillitoe has died at the age of 82, his family said. The Nottingham-born writer, whose novels marked him out as one of the Angry Young Men of British fiction who emerged in the 1950s, died at Charing Cross Hospital in London..."
By definition, the modern practice of history begins with written records; evidence of human culture without writing is the realm of prehistory.