A few years ago the podcaster Lex Fridman published a list of books that he was hoping to read in the year ahead. It included works by George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse and others. If he had published this in the world of print media he might have got back some encouraging noises. But because he put the list online – worse, on the platform then still known as Twitter – he received mostly mockery. ‘Who hasn’t read Animal Farm ?’ was the general tenor of the blowback, as though a man who had been a researcher at MIT was next to being a neanderthal.

I watched that passing storm with interest because one of the things that often strikes me about people who presume themselves to be well-educated is how often they feel the need to give off the impression that they have read, he

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