I wrote this about how to read and why. Books remain the best technology ever invented to understand life and the world. There is no alternative. Every book you read helps you build a richer picture of the entire world.

RT @j_amesmarriott: I spoke to the New Statesman about the dawn of the post-literate society. Books are rapidly being replaced by addictive….

I spoke to the New Statesman about the dawn of the post-literate society. Books are rapidly being replaced by addictive screen slop. In my view it is the most significant cultural and political and disaster of our time.

Wonderful. Some aesthetically over sensitive government censors in eighteenth century France got carried away and started trying to object to books on literary as well as political grounds

RT @j_amesmarriott: The Times have allowed me to print the distilled essence of my life philosophy - I wrote this about why everyone should….

RT @j_amesmarriott: Really enjoyed this conversation with the New Statesman podcast about the death of the English degree and the dawn of t….

RT @j_amesmarriott: The culture of the screen is replacing the culture of the book - in my view the most dramatic social and cultural trans….

RT @j_amesmarriott: My latest newsletter rounding up everything interesting I read in books and on the internet last week: the origin of th….

(appreciate the irony of denouncing short form video via the medium of short form video).

The culture of the screen is replacing the culture of the book - in my view the most dramatic social and cultural transformation of our time.

Robert Darnton writes that if we are ever tempted by the fallacy that people in the past were just like us we should remember that torturing and burning cats was one of the most popular past times in eighteenth century Europe - people found it genuinely side-splittingly hilarious

My latest newsletter rounding up everything interesting I read in books and on the internet last week: the origin of the fork, Machiavelli, the baby boom, Italian pop music, and the way the physical world is being designed to accommodate tech addiction.

Probably one of the most prophetic paragraphs of the twentieth century - from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

"No Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think" - Neil Postman (1985)

RT @Will___lloyd: Enjoyed discussing the “death of English literature” with @j_amesmarriott and @tanjil_rashid_ on the @NewStatesman podcas….

In some ways the conservative moral panic about novel-reading in the C18th was justified - the spread of literacy was a factor in the birth of a more liberal and democratic society and the overthrow of the aristocratic ancien regime. But obviously we consider that a good thing.

RT @bernardtjoy: The age of the book has gone. The age of the screen has come. Seems abundantly evident and it is certainly rewiring our br….

Actually quite a bleak tweet because for every kid like this there are hundreds of thousands of others who also might have picked up the Iliad but will be given smartphones and so will never touch it or any other book.

RT @holland_tom: It is always good, when tempted to moan, to reflect on how unbelievably lucky I am to live when and where I do.

(These quotes are from The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton).

RT @OldRoberts953: I could never understand, even as a small child, why everybody doesn’t get this. History lessons terrified me!.