The rumoured demise of books has produced plenty of books. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death explained how the showy values of television menaced the calmer culture of the printed word. Nine years later, Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies rued the disruption of precious modes of reading by the advent of electronic media. Now, James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society presents the smartphone as a potential civilisation-killer. Marriott, a columnist for The Times, concedes that the medieval so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were not as dim as that label suggests, but he fears that ours soon will be.

According to Marriott, the decline of print threatens the ‘whole edifice of enlightened modernity’, because ‘without reading, the world is going to become less rational and more disordered’. Although some people still read as much as their bookish forebears, he argues that ‘knowledge is once again becoming the preserve of an elite minority’, and therefore ‘the literate foundations on which liberal democracy rests are crumbling’. Thanks to inane short videos, Marriott claims, even ‘the text-based internet … is dying now’ (an odd remark when the internet is freshly awash with the wordiness of Artificial Intelligence). In his view, plenty of our century’s foolishness is ‘a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and the colonisation of our culture by addictive screens’.

One sees why he is inclined to say this sort of thing. When hordes plod the streets transfixed by their phones, as if in a zombie iPocalypse, and while the world endures the trumpery of Donald Trump, it is tempting to nod in vague agreement. But strip the hyperbole from