Students ‘can get a degree without reading books’

MILLENNIALS can get away with reading ‘hardly any’ books to earn a first-class degree in history or English literature, according to a leading novelist.

‘This is not because they’re stupid – far from it – but because they get their facts off their phone,’ said Sebastian Faulks, 65, the author of Birdsong.

Speaking about his new novel Paris Echo at the Henley Literary Festival at the weekend, he added: ‘I don’t know what they do instead of books, but they do something and they get a first-class degree for doing it.

‘I don’t know if the younger generation doesn’t read at all. Of course there are bookish people, but I do think it’s possible to get a good degree from a good university having read fewer books than used to be the case.

‘And does one mourn this? I so don’t want to be the old man who mourns these things. But things are changing a lot about the ways that people have access to information.’

Faulks also said identity politics had left culture more fragmented and some classic books of the past – part of a canon of ‘great’ literature – had lost their status ‘as the idea of one thing being better than another is lost’.