ABSTRACT
Yet its restless legacy remains to haunt the earnest adult mind with a fitful, irritable conviction that it would be a ‘good thing’ if the kids read newspapers instead of getting all their information from Bitesize TV. Nothing pleases a pedagogical parent more than the sight of a child engrossed in a broadsheet. I felt a bitter pang of envy the other day, escorting young teens to a Meat Loaf concert, when one of the boys wanted to stop and buy the new Economist. I have not been so choked with intellectual envy since we went to Phantom of the Opera and the two most musical eight-year-old girls in the party rushed to the shop at the interval to buy not T-shirts or CDs, but copies of the score.
