As Laura Freeman, the arts journalist and author of The Reading Cure, puts it, rather beautifully: ‘A book never bothers.59 A book doesn’t wheedle. No one has asked you to subscribe, sign up, enter your card details, your username, your password. The battery never dies. The WiFi never cuts out. In an age when we are ever more targeted and profiled and mined for information, reading a book allows you to be, for so long as the covers hold you, truly quiet and undisturbed.’
