David Pennington

This idea is nothing new and ever more relevant in our age of digital detoxes and celebrities who are famous for being famous. We know what we want, we have made that choice, and the only chance for improvement is a gritty dedication to your discipline.

“Imagine if you owned the Lakers or the Yankees, and put all the emphasis on the team brand—but kept reducing the pay to actual players.”

In every organisation, whether in the public or private sector, a great inversion has taken place where the people who do actual, useful work (from surgeons to call-centre staff) find themselves working at the behest of a vast army of box-tickers and pen-pushers who demand that they must conform to a host of metrics and proxy targets so their... See more

We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called... See more

. As author Leah Price put it in her book How to Do Things with Nooks in Victorian Britain: “Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.”