In 1994, when this book came out, its author Sven Birketts was reflecting on answerphones and CD-Roms, thinking about renting a video, and using an IBM Selector to type. Yet he managed to predict many of our present ills. Writing at a time when people hoped to fine-tune printed books…

A young member of the family asked how the recent horrors had come about. This was my best shot. I made four points. Ottomans Under the Ottoman empire before the First World War, Jews and Arabs lived side by side in Palestine without too much trouble. The Ottoman empire came…

My life makes little sense because mine is a liminal generation. The point when I should have launched into flourishing was a point when the world changed. Like all great changes, it has been recognised only backwards and too late. We came unprepared. …

‘Cultural Capital’ is a buzzword in some schools, but no-one in schools seems to know what it means. They tell you that Pierre Bourdieu came up with the phrase, but they use his phrase to mean the opposite. They think ‘cultural capital’ can set people free; that it can be…

Teaching children about death: not everyone’s idea of a really great gig. An Anglican bishop wants schools to do it. There are supposed to be lessons on grief. …

Once there was a book, Inside UFO 54–40. It was one of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’. Books like that, in the 1970s and 1980s, gave readers an option about what would happen next. At points in the narrative it was the reader who would choose whether to turn…

If you enjoyed the repetitive didacticism of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, you will love the Barbie movie. Robert Tressell’s once famous novel dealt with the realities of class, but Barbie presents the more important reality of feelings. Time was when ‘pink’ had been a way to describe the left-of-centre, politically. In…

The novelists I like most do not write as they should. They write in every way that I was told not to. W.G. Sebald can take a page to finish one sentence. László Krasznahorkai’s sentences are multiply parenthentical, full of complexes. He can write a novella in a sentence. …

It used to be said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Fish and bicycles have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Yet they have more in common, than AI has with God. So I was pretty cast down by a conversation recently. “Artificial…