Dear Richard,

Many thanks for your prompt response! Now, do you happen to have ˜Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs' by R. Courtney? As a matter of fact, it contains some curious entries noone seems to be familiar with - remember the phrase BE CLOSED WITH SOMEONE, incidentally the one you offered BE CLOSETED WITH comes right after that one.

So, step two in our logical sequence:

According to ˜Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs' by R. Courtney, quote:

MAKE SOMEONE FREE OF - give someone special rights in something: I owe grateful thanks to my former university teacher, who MADE ME FREE OF his library of rare books so that I could write this report.

Two questions in this connection:

Would you accept this interpretation?
What additional or alternative meaning(s) would you ascribe to the phrase?

Gratefully Yuri

Hi, Yuri!

As I mentioned before, there are lots of times when the two prepositions are interchangeable. This is one of those times. I'm certainly comfortable with both prepositions.

One afterthought: I get the feeling that of works a little better in this case because I don't think the speaker is really talking about physical release from the library. We tend to use from more for actual physical release. At least, that's my opinion.

Richard