He waited while she closed the front door, then followed her into the sitting-room, the entrance to which was immediately on the right. The inevitable three-piece suite of furniture was grouped round the tiled fireplace in which was laid, and had obviously been so for some time, a fire.
On the mantelpiece was a large clock, and on each side of it a couple of scrofulous china dogs; immediately above was a sun mirror. To the right was the television set, on the near wall a case filled with pre-television books.
‘What is the matter?’ she asked hurriedly, as soon as they had sat down.
Counsel for the
Defence by Jeffrey Ashford.
Best-selling British
thriller, 1960.
The National Year of Reading 2026 is a major UK initiative designed to combat declining literacy and book readership by presenting reading as a contemporary, essential activity with the potential to see it no longer outrivalled by its internet/TV competition.
Led by the Department for Education and National Literacy Trust, the campaign is the first to unfold against a fully digital attention-grabbing economy, operating in the era of smartphones, streaming platforms and — critically — generative artificial intelligence. Except, rather than condemn this digital revolution, the campaign acknowledges it directly.
The urgency of the initiative is grounded in the very latest evidence with survey data cited by the campaign indicating that only around one in three young people aged 8 to 18 report enjoying reading in their leisure time, and roughly one in five read daily for pleasure.
The worthy aim is a sea change in reading habits with an ambitious agenda that requires coordinated, system-wide action rather than isolated interventions.
And yet . . . and yet . . . how pleasurable it must have been to guiltlessly light that fire set for us in the grate before the age of smoke abatement laws and, untroubled, to have curled up at the hearth with a good book before our surrender to the tide of digital saturation that now stifles this once time-honoured pursuit.
