… is just one of the nice turns of phrase to come out of Philip Pullman’s address at the weekend to the Society of Authors’ Conference in Cambridge. Read it yourself to see exactly who he was speaking about.

A clue is that he was talking about the age banding of books, which has been mentioned briefly here before. His contention – and he gets no argument from me – is that age banding is just a symptom of a much wider spread illness of our modern world.