There is an article on the Telegraph by Liam Kelly dated 12 February 2026 which I had to read. Its title was “Why Gen Z are too stupid to read Wuthering Heights”. My interest was simple: I have a few relatives who are Gen Z, and I always thought they are quite bright.

Liam Kelly is a senior culture writer and covers the full sweep of arts and entertainment, from literary prizes to Eurovision. He reported live from Oasis’s reunion gigs and played The Traitors on location in Scotland with Claudia Winkleman. Liam has been shortlisted for a number of awards. He has even won a few.

“The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.

Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.

Social media is awash with Gen Z readers who claim to love literature but lament that they find Wuthering Heights – a book regularly taught at GCSE and A-level – too difficult.

“Guys, this is testing me for real. I feel so stupid,” says Grace Deutsch, whose profile goes by the name Grace’s Mini Library, in a typical TikTok post about Wuthering Heights. “And I have a theory that anyone who says that they absolutely loved this book only says that to sound smart. I’m so serious, because, like, what do you mean?!”

Another TikTok user, who goes by the alias Wagesylie, has put together a popular five-part plan to help readers tackle Brontë “if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what’s going on”. It includes alternating between chapters and study guides – a “gut check” to see if you are “understanding the plot” – and listening to the audiobook while reading a hard copy.

These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.

What is going on? There appears to be a growing consensus that the prevalence of smartphones has systematically eroded attention spans, particularly among the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.

Is it really so surprising that, as we enter what critics have described as a “post-literate” age, young people who have spent much of their lives scrolling through mindless videos might find a masterpiece of Victorian literature a struggle? After all, university professors in the UK and the US have reported that literature undergraduates are increasingly unable to get through a whole novel. That it may not be surprising, of course, does not make it any less depressing.

Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. A viral piece in American online magazine The Atlantic in October 2024 featured professors who said students were struggling to read full novels, or even poetry. One reported that only extracts from Homer’s Odyssey are now set, supplemented with “music, articles and Ted Talks”, because even elite students are unable to grasp the full text or its themes.

We all know that people read less than they used to. A survey conducted for World Book Day last year found that 40 per cent of Britons had not read a single book in the past 12 months, a worrying trend that is even more pronounced among children. According to the National Literacy Trust, only a third of those aged eight to 18 now read books in their free time. It is not hard to conclude that comprehension skills are being diminished as a result.

The commentator James Marriott has described the collapse of reading as “one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times”, given that the spread of mass literacy was one of the foundations on which stable, prosperous democracies were built. If people do not – or cannot – read, but instead take their cultural sustenance from short videos or podcasts, there is a risk that society could drift back towards oral storytelling, which largely faded centuries ago. Surely nobody wants to return to the Dark Ages?

That so many people appear to be struggling with Wuthering Heights is no surprise to experts. Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University who has written extensively on the Brontës, tells me the novel is a “difficult text” with a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards”.

O’Callaghan, whose biography of Emily Bronte has been expanded and updated ahead of its republication in June, adds: “It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”

The corner of TikTok that has helped encourage young people to read – inevitably called “BookTok” – has largely been a boon for publishers of schlocky, unchallenging “romantasy” titles and thrillers rather than classics. Perhaps the marketing of the new film has led would-be readers to assume the source text was a romcom, rather than an at-times-harrowing account of unrequited love and generational trauma. That may be what a Valentine’s Day weekend release does to potential cinemagoers.

The marketing machine behind the film has been in overdrive. Press tours have featured Robbie – practising “method dressing”in elaborate corseted gowns – and Elordi walking the red carpet together, embracing embracing and swooning. Official merchandise tie-ins range from snacks to lingerie, bedclothes and massage oil. All are a far cry from the desolation of the Yorkshire moors.

There is some self-awareness among those who now find themselves unable to get through Wuthering Heights about what has hindered their comprehension skills. “It has not taken me long to realise that there is some brain rot happening,” Mary Skinner, another bookish TikTokker, says in a recent video. “It’s actually been a wake-up call for me. I don’t think I’ve read anything other than books that were extremely easily digestible in… it’s got to be over six months. I’m finding this much more challenging than I would have a couple of years ago.”

 Declining literacy skills have also fuelled an explosion in AI reading apps, including Clippit, Reedy and Amazon Kindle’s “Ask” feature, which promise to simplify language (often by modernising it), signpost plots and explain characters’ intentions before they are fully fleshed out by the author. Don’t have time to pore over hundreds of pages before bed? Simply scan the text and get the gist of the story, without exercising your brain or stretching your intellectual capacities. How very dystopian.

But how hard is it to get through Wuthering Heights, really? My recent re-read was largely trouble-free – and not because I am some sort of singular genius. There was the odd word to look up, such as when Heathcliff is described as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”, or when the narrator says, “I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” – but Brontë’s language is, for the most part, fairly accessible (though the same cannot be said for her eccentric use of commas). This is hardly late Joyce.

While the new film has been criticised in some quarters for straying too far from the source text, it includes plenty of verbatim quotations (think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” and “I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine”). “There’s just no better dialogue than Brontë’s,” Fennell said at a British Film Institute talk last week. “She’s got these extraordinary, extraordinary words.”

One reason readers may find Wuthering Heights challenging comes down to expectations. Is the novel a love story? A tale of revenge? Some combination of the two? Or something else entirely? “We tend not to make people comfortable with ambiguity, and that requires deeper reading, more critical reading, and reflection on the multiple perspectives within a novel,” says O’Callaghan.

That is all well and good – laudable, even. But if we really are entering a post-literate age, are people who struggle with a book such as Wuthering Heights capable of deeper, more critical reading? Or are we drifting towards a bleak future in which novels must guide readers by the hand?

There is an article on The Conversation website by Naomi S Brown, Professor Emerita Linguistics at American University, dated 13 August 2025, which makes just that point.

Professor Baron is interested in language and technology, written language, reading, the history and structure of English, and higher education. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her books include Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (which won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008), Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (2015), and How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio (2021). Her newest book (forthcoming) is Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing.

Naomi S Baron

Ms Baron says:”A perfect storm is brewing for reading.

AI arrived as both kids  and adults were already spending less time reading books than they did in the not-so-distant past. A new study shows the amount of reading for pleasure that Americans are doing is down 40% since the early 2000s.

As a linguist, I study how technology influences the ways people read, write and think.

This includes the impact of artificial intelligence, which is dramatically changing how people engage with books or other kinds of writing, whether it’s assigned, used for research or read for pleasure. I worry that AI is accelerating an ongoing shift in the value people place on reading as a human endeavor.

Everything but the book

AI’s writing skills have gotten plenty of attention. But researchers and teachers are only now starting to talk about AI’s ability to “read” massive datasets before churning out summaries, analyses or comparisons of books, essays and articles.

Need to read a novel for class? These days, you might get by with skimming through an AI-generated summary of the plot and key themes. This kind of possibility, which undermines people’s motivation to read on their own, prompted me to write a book about the pros and cons of letting AI do the reading for you.

Palming off the work of summarizing or analyzing texts is hardly new. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s. Centuries earlier, the Royal Society of London began producing summaries of scientific papers that appeared in its voluminous “Philosophical Transactions.” By the mid-20th century, abstracts had become ubiquitous in scholarly articles. Potential readers could now peruse the abstract before deciding whether to tackle the piece in its entirety.

The internet opened up an array of additional reading shortcuts. For instance, Blinkist is an app-based, subscription service that condenses mostly nonfiction books into roughly 15-minute summaries – called “Blinks” – that are available in both audio and text.

But generative AI elevates such workarounds to new heights. AI-driven apps like BooksAI provide the kinds of summaries and analyses that used to be crafted by humans. Meanwhile, BooksAI.chat invites you to “chat” with books. In neither case do you need to read the books yourself.

If you’re a student asked to compare Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” as coming-of-age novels, CliffsNotes only gets you so far. Sure, you can read summaries of each book, but you still must do the comparison yourself. With general large language models or specialized tools such as Google NotebookLM, AI handles both the “reading” and the comparing, even generating smart questions to pose in class.

The downside is that you lose out on a critical benefit of reading a coming-of-age novel: the personal growth that comes from vicariously experiencing the protagonist’s struggles.

In the world of academic research, AI offerings like SciSpace, Elicit and Consensus combine the power of search engines and large language models. They locate relevant articles and then summarize and synthesize them, slashing the hours needed to conduct literature reviews. On its website, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect AI gloats: “Goodbye wasted reading time. Hello relevance.”

Maybe. Excluded from the process is judging for yourself what counts as relevant and making your own connections between ideas.

Reader unfriendly?

Even before generative AI went mainstream, fewer people were reading books, whether for pleasure or for class.

In the U.S., the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that the number of fourth graders who read for fun almost every day slipped from 53% in 1984 to 39% in 2022 . For eighth graders? From 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023. The UK’s 2024 National Literacy Trust survey revealed that only one in three 8- to 18-year-olds said they enjoyed reading in their spare time, a drop of almost 9 percentage points from just the previous year.

Similar trends exist among older students. In a 2018 survey of 600,000 15-year-olds across 79 countries, 49% reported reading only when they had to. That’s up from 36% about a decade earlier.

The picture for college students is no brighter. A spate of recent articles has chronicled how little reading is happening in American higher education. My work with literacy researcher Anne Mangen found that faculty are reducing the amount of reading they assign, often in response to students refusing to do it.

Emblematic of the problem is a troubling observation from cultural commentator David Brooks:

“I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said: ‘You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through the class.’”

Now adults: According to YouGov, just 54% of Americans read at least one book in 2023. The situation in South Korea is even bleaker, where only 43% of adults said they had read at least one book in 2023, down from almost 87% in 1994. In the U.K., The Reading Agency observed declines in adult reading and hinted at one reason why. In 2024, 35% of adults identified as lapsed readers – they once read regularly, but no longer do. Of those lapsed readers, 26% indicated they had stopped reading because of time spent on social media.

The phrase “lapsed reader” might now apply to anyone who deprioritizes reading, whether it’s due to lack of interest, devoting more time to social media or letting AI do the reading for you.

All that’s lost, missed and forgotten

Why read in the first place?

The justifications are endless, as are the streams of books and websites making the case. There’s reading for pleasure, stress reduction, learning and personal development.

You can find correlations between reading and brain growth in children, happiness, longevity, and slowing cognitive decline.

This last issue is particularly relevant as people increasingly let AI do cognitive work on their behalf, a process known as cognitive offloading. Research has emerged showing the extent to which people are engaged in cognitive offloading when they use AI. The evidence reveals that the more users rely on AI to perform work for them, the less they see themselves as drawing upon their own thinking capacities. A study employing EEG measurements found different brain connectivity patterns when participants enlisted AI to help them write an essay than when writing it on their own.

It’s too soon to know what effects AI might have on our long-term ability to think for ourselves. What’s more, the research so far has largely focused on writing tasks or general use of AI tools, not on reading. But if we lose practice in reading and analyzing and formulating our own interpretations, those skills are at risk of weakening.

Cognitive skills aren’t the only thing at stake when we rely too heavily on AI to do our reading work for us. We also miss out on so much of what makes reading enjoyable – encountering a moving piece of dialogue, relishing a turn of phrase, connecting with a character.

AI’s lure of efficiency is tantalizing. But it risks undermining the benefits of literacy.”

As I said in last week’s post, my immersion in the biography of Xi Jinping has motivated me to refresh my understanding of Marxism (last week) and Leninism (this week). I looked for a book on Leninism on Amazon, and I found Foundations of Leninism which had good reviews. It was written by J V Stalin.

Really? By Joseph Stalin? The book doesn’t clearly identify its author. It was copyrighted and printed in 2018 by the Bolsheviki Press, of Paden, Oklahoma, USA. On page 1, it does say:

written by J V Stalin

Source; Works: Volume 6, pages 71-196

The Soviet dictator, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born ‘Dzhugashvili’ 18 December 1878 and died 5 March 1953. So, Yes, my conclusion is that the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, did write this book- really a pamphlet of 92 pages, excerpted from his larger works, posthumously – but probably about 100 years ago, and in an entirely different context.

Joseph V Stalin

This short book – really a pamphlet of 92 pages. of which about 75 pages is really relevant text – deals with the Foundations of Leninism from a historical perspective. Apart from basic socialist concepts, there is very little ideology included in it. Stalin was a strong supporter of Lenin. and he certainly had front row seat.

The index is as follows:

• The historical roots of Leninism: Marxism, socialism, feudalism, the Russian revolition
• The dictatorship of the proletariat – as opposed to the ruling classes and the tzar
• The peasant question: are they part of the proletariat?
• The national question: which countries are involved and how?
• Strategy and tactics – to be followed in various phases of a revolution.
• The Party – organisational considerations.
• Style of work: this two-page section characterises the culture of a Leninist party (Bolsheviks) as being a combination of ‘Russian revolutionary sweep, and American efficiency’; get it all done well.

Certainly, we know that Lenin was a very determined, dedicated individual.

I can’t recommend this book unless you’re interested in Bolshevik history.

I’ve got to post some thoughts that have nothing to do with books or writing, but I’ve just have to get them off my chest. I’ll return to books and writing in a day of two.

Yesterday was Liberation Day in the States, according to Trump. My question is: Who was liberated? Abraham Lincoln took care of that problem over one hundred and fifty years ago. Any other Americans were not and certainly won’t be liberated by what happened yesterday. Nobody in the rest of the world was or will be liberated. Maybe it’s just the Big Man himself who was liberated from his hankering to try tariffs as the way to MAGA and to make America rich again.

I’ll come back to MAGA again later, but the rich part also appears doubtful. He seem to think that tariffs are paid by the importer to the government and that’s the end of it. But the importer (either a US company or an individual) has to take the payment from his/her/their own funds. Tariffs are, essentially, a tax on the importer. Yes, they make the government richer, but they also make the importing individual or company equally poorer.

When you consider the effects of tariffs, they definitely make the whole country poorer. First of all, they drive up prices for two reasons: they drive up the prices of imported goods and services, and no they longer provide a barrier against the lower prices of previously imported goods; as a result, domestic suppliers have an invitation to raise their prices. Inflation ramps up. Secondly, importing companies go out of business, because they can’t sell at the higher prices. (Think of foreign car dealerships.) Also, US companies that used to export are hit by the reciprocal tariffs find that they can’t sell either and close up shop. With companies closing, unemployment goes up, and our Gross National Product (a measure of our national wealth) goes down.

There are probably many imported items we can do without: Mercedes cars, French champagne, Japanese wagyu beef, and Chinese childrens’ toys. But what if we can’t sell our whiskey, Mustangs, soybeans, financial services, oil and gas, Levis and Harley Davidsons?

So how is this mess going to end? There are several. I don’t know which it will be.

Trump might back off and ‘cut some deals’. Yes, this is a possibility, but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon. There are over sixty countries who’ve been hit with tariffs. Each one is angry. Each one has a particular US vulnerability they want to hit – maybe it’s a particular rare metal that they have a kind of monopoly of. Negotiations are going to be messy and time consuming, and each one of those 60+ negotiations has the be handled by the Big Man, not by the Department of Commerce.

Congress could take control. With Congress controlled by the Republicans, that won’t be a near term event. Yes, Congress is angry that Trump broke his inauguration vow to follow the Constitution, which gives the right to set tariffs to Congress and not the President. But it’s going to take plenty of renegade Republicans to break ranks. Don’t hold your breath.

The US Supreme Court could hear a constitutional case and rule against the President. Maybe, but the Court is stacked in the President’s favor, and the court doesn’t often set speed records.

The World Trade Organisation (or anybody else) says Trump is wrong. Are you kidding?

I said I’d get back to MAGA, and I have some questions about Great Countries: Does a Great Country

• shut down its entire foreign aid program, leaving millions of sick, hungry, poor, and terrified people on their own?
• seek to do financial deals with countries which attack their neighbours and deprive their own people of human rights?
• disregard and belittle international rules of behaviour which have been codified and adhered to by the large majority of nations?

No, I don’t think so.

Matt’s cartoon from last week’s Daily Telegraph!

Yesterday’s Telegraph has an article by Philip Johnston about the dangers of giving AI companies (particularly American ones) a free hand in training their artificial intelligence.

Philip Johnston has been with the Daily Telegraph for more than 20 years. He is currently assistant editor and leader writer and was previously home affairs editor and chief political correspondent.

Philip Johnston

He wrote, “Labour is planning to undermine copyright laws. The only winners will be the Silicon Valley tech bros.

Have you read any good books by Franklin Chase recently? Who on earth is he, you may well ask. I was on the Amazon site looking to pre-order Ungovernable, the diaries of Simon Hart, the former government chief whip, only to see another copy of almost the same book was already on Kindle. Moreover, it was “available instantly”, unlike Mr Hart’s which does not come out until the end of this week.

Only it wasn’t the same book, but an AI generated imitation with just 46 pages for £8.99. I downloaded it to find what might charitably be called a pile of old rubbish. “Politics is not for the weak,” its prologue begins. “It resembles a battlefield where alliances shift unpredictably, loyalty is often quickly exhausted and the difference between success and failure is extremely narrow. Few have navigated this perilous journey … Simon Hart is one of those exceptional individuals.”

Chapter one opens with the “August sun casting long shadows across the undulating hills of the Cotswolds” where a six-year-old Hart “dashed through the fields, his laughter carried by the breeze”. At least I hope this isn’t the real book. Who has got my wasted £8.99 I have no idea.

I called up Simon, an old acquaintance, and pointed out that this book by one Franklin Chase was basically pretending to be his and might be bought by an unwary would-be reader who had enjoyed the newspaper extracts of the real McCoy last week. He had recently been alerted to this but was told by his publishers that nothing could be done about it. “It is one of those those things in the new AI world” they said.

Indeed, it turns out that Mr Chase is quite a prolific mimic of other books. Among his recent publications are the memoirs of the actress Tuppence Middleton – Rising Through the Storm: A Journey of Fear, Fame and Fierce Resilience. Or the footballer Duncan Ferguson – From Prison Walls to Premier League Triumph. Or Robert Dessaix, the Australian author, Abandoned at Birth, Shaped by Love.

Each of these authors has a book coming out which these titles purport to emulate, all with the real name far larger than the enigmatic and indefatigable Chase, who is clearly an AI bot. These rip-offs are examples of the way generative AI is able to plunder massive amounts of data to create an almost instant book.

Since they are not plagiarised, they are strictly not a breach of copyright but doubtless they use information from some sources that should be protected. Amazon says it takes these fakes down if complaints are made but so many are appearing it is hard to keep up. Indeed, there is already another Simon Hart lookalike on the website: The Untold Story of a Modern Conservative by one Maeve Sterling, who also managed to publish a biography of Louis B Mayer this month.

The Labour Government now proposes to blunder into this brave new world by making it easier for tech giants to “mine” for creative material to feed into the voracious maws of their AI monsters. A 10-week consultation period into plans to remove copyright protections enjoyed by authors, musicians and others so that their work can be plundered to “train” their algorithms ended on February 24. This would be done by way of what is known as the text and data mining (TDM) exemption that currently applies to non-commercial research and would be extended to creative works still under copyright.

The work of British writers, composers and artists could be purloined allowing AI companies to profit from them and, in many cases, not repay the creator. The AI creations would then get IP protection despite having compromised the intellectual property of others. It is astonishing that a British government would contemplate this and yet this is the preferred option in the consultation paper.

Ministers are even planning to block an attempt in the House of Lords to preserve copyright laws by amending the Data (Use and Access) Bill now before Parliament. Baroness Kidron, a film-maker and crossbench peer behind the amendments, said this would be a “travesty”. She added: “The Government has just shown its colours again. It wants to make the UK an AI hub of America and they’re sacrificing the creative industries to do it.”

The Daily Telegraph in common with other newspapers has issued an eleventh-hour plea to ministers to drop the idea. If anything, they should be strengthening copyright against this wholly new and sinister attack on creative material.

Some big stars have joined the hue and cry. Brian May, the Queen guitarist, fears the industrial scale theft of other people’s talent by the AI behemoths cannot be stopped. Simon Cowell, the music producer, said the artistic livelihoods of many risk being wiped out. A letter signed by scores of artists said the Government’s approach “would smash a hole in the moral right of creators to present their work as they wish”, jeopardising the country’s reputation as a beacon of creativity.

The idea that a Labour government is bending over backwards to fill the coffers of Meta, Google and Elon Musk in this way is frankly baffling. So, too, was the Government’s refusal along with the Americans to sign a recent communiqué in Paris about controlling the growth of AI.

Sir Keir Starmer, who is to meet Donald Trump on Thursday, may have calculated that it would be better to be seen to support the AI Wild West that the new White House is happy to see and hope we get a slice of the action.

In the absence of anything else, Labour sees AI as the key to unlocking growth. Supporters say copyright restrictions get in the way of AI’s development and leave the UK struggling to catch up with America and China. Meanwhile, the people who invented AI are terrified about what it might do next.

Of course, the theft of creative material is hardly new. When a Christmas Carol was published in December 1843, knock-offs were on the streets within days claiming to be by Dickens. When a pirated version appeared in Peter Parley’s Illuminated Magazine the author sought an injunction against the publication.

He won but the magazine declared bankruptcy, leaving Dickens with costs of £700. It was thefts like these which necessitated copyright laws. It would be grotesque were Labour now to preside over their demise just to ingratiate themselves with J D Vance.”

Hows true! We’ll have to write to our MPs!

The Guardian had an article on 29 January by Vanessa Thorpe, Arts and Media Correspondent, about proposed changed to the process of selecting fellows of the Royal Society of Literature.

Bernardine Evaristo, President, Royal Society of Literature

I quote from the article: “Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, an august body founded in London in 1820, seemed poised to stride into the new year on a bold footing, with an inclusive programme of events and a revitalised membership. Its Booker prize-winning president, Bernardine Evaristo, alongside poet Daljit Nagra, chair of the society’s leadership council, were promising further modernisation soon.

But a major revolt among longer-term fellows is now threatening to destabilise the society. A council meeting of members next month will be forced to address a growing number of complaints.

‘There is a lot of turbulence,’ recent president Marina Warner told the Observer. ‘It is a question of a lack of respect for older members and a loss of institutional history, which was something fellows cherished.’

The RSL has not responded officially to public criticism, and did not respond to requests for comment, but this weekend the leadership sent out a letter to alert members to ‘a concerted campaign of disinformation’ and to ask them not to share this ‘misinformation’.

Set up under the patronage of George IV to ‘reward literary merit and excite literary talent’, the society, based in Somerset House, still has royal sponsorship from Queen Camilla. But those critical of its recent past speak of a ‘shambolic’ and ‘clubby’ institution – a place intended to shelter elite talent, rather than represent the wider community of accomplished writers.

‘The society should not just be for a group of older, rather entitled, people, however distinguished. These problems had to be sorted quickly,’ said one new fellow this weekend.

In a speech given last year, Evaristo challenged the assumption that the RSL was still ‘old-fashioned.’ It was, she said, now ‘very forward-looking, very progressive and committed to inclusion at every level’. Under the day-to-day leadership of director Molly Rosenberg the society has won greater funding and shed its cosy atmosphere.

But those same ‘radical moves’ heralded by Evaristo, designed to make the RSL more relevant and more diverse, have prompted a rebellion. The novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour recently resigned, and amid allegations of ‘scandalous’ disregard for proper procedures, a number of members have told the Observer they are considering following suit. This comes after the resignation in 2018 of Piers Paul Read in response to an initial call for younger fellows.

There are fears among members that the strife will soon rival divisions in the Society of Authors, where Philip Pullman stepped down as president last year because he claimed he could not speak freely in the role.

The RSL’s latest efforts to diversify followed Evaristo’s assessment that the charity ‘needed to change’ to become one that is ‘for all writers, rather than traditionally writers who are white and middle class’, and so last year 62 new fellows were inducted.

Plans for 2024 include a change to the method of electing fellows, who must have written a minimum of two distinguished works. Currently, to be recognised with fellowship an author must be nominated by an existing fellow or honorary fellow before being considered by the RSL council and senior officers. Under the new process the public will be invited to recommend writers for fellowship and then a series of broader-based election panels will consider the recommendations.

This is the sort of fundamental switch that unsettles writer Amanda Craig: ‘It used to be an enormous honour to become a fellow. But when people are just starting their writing careers, it is not the same.’

A former chair of the society, Anne Chisholm, told the Observer: ‘Of course the RSL, like all venerable institutions, has an imperfect past: it needed to change with the times. My worry is that the pace and style of change has lately been alienating too many fellows and disrespecting the RSL’s history.'”

I have given up my membership in RSL because it did not have events which interested me, not that I thought that there was anything wrong with the events. It is, clearly, an elitist and fusty organisation, but I think that any venerable institution invites disaster when it goes for sweeping changes. Far better, in my opinion to make careful, incremental changes, bringing the membership along at each step. The requirement for prospective fellows to have two distinguished works is probably fair, if one has a clear idea what a ‘distinguished’ work is. Under the old admission regime, long-time fellows looked for literary quality novels and scholarly non-fiction. Under the proposed regime, ‘broad-based election panels’ may have an entirely different idea of what a ‘distinguished work’ is. My concern is that literary quality may be sacrificed for popularity with particular readerships, genres, subject matters, or styles.