Sir Jonathan Bate, a professor of English literature at Oxford, this week voiced his concern at the “attrition of attention span”, as witnessed through his undergraduates’ inability to keep up with reading lists. “Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
It isn’t just young people who are finding it hard to concentrate on books. In July, the UK charity The Reading Agency found that only half of UK adults now read regularly for pleasure. So how can we put our phones down and get back into reading?
