The London Underground used to be a happy place for authors. We would get into a carriage and see rows of people, studiously ignoring their neighbours – unless their neighbour was a dog – and reading a newspaper or an actual, physical book. The same went for the New York subway and, to a lesser extent, all train networks.

Today you get into a carriage and everyone is staring into the same phone screens that they stare into most of the rest of the day.

Books give us some ability to see through, as well as put into perspective, the troubles of our time

Books give us some ability to see through, as well as put into perspective, the troubles of our time

I try not to be judgmental about this, since I always try to see the best in people, however disgusting they might look. So I tell myself that perhaps some portion of the passengers are reading Thucydides or the latest highbrow novel. But I doubt it. The phone today is such a distracting device that during a 30-minute train journey in which someone might once have got through a chapter of a novel, today they have seen 100 videos of cats being attacked by a boa constrictor or Piers Morgan being attacked by a fact. And it’s not just a problem for other people. It’s a problem for all of us. I suspect most people reading this will have noticed that we read fewer books than we used to and spend ever more time on our devices. People present this as a problem for the kids, but it’s a problem for the adults too.

A slew of recent books and articles have........

© The Spectator