Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books is taken up by the Daily Mail, which confidently pins the blame on social media. By which, inevitably, it means TikTok rather than inane globules of micro-celeb gossip emanating from certain tabloid... ah, right, that would be it...

PS: The Mail, obviously, has previous.

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:

When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.

The thing is, I still believe that...