The Critical Commentator

  According to a YouGov poll from last year, more than 60 per cent of 18-24-year-olds prefer watching TV with captions, compared with 13 per cent of their parents... What accounts for this youthful passion for reading while you watch? Phones, of course. Or to use the antiseptic industry jargon, "second screening": enjoying a film or show while simultaneously being sucked into your phone... How many gigs have I watched through my phone camera, overpowered by the impulse to prove I was there? How many times have I muttered at morons - sorry, art lovers - snapping photos of Monet's sand-grainy sunbathers and Degas' ballerinas, rather than, oh I don't know, looking at them ?... Vetheuil Claude Monet (1840-1926) Photo Credit: Glasgow Life Museums [CC BY-NC-ND] At a Banksy exhibition at Glasgow's modern art gallery last year, visitors' phones were sealed in foam pouches at the - conveniently anonymous - artist's request. "We want folk not trying to view...

 In January...Chris O'Shea, the chief executive of Centrica (the owner of British Gas said his £4.5m pay package was "impossible to justify" and "so there's no point in trying to do that." In 2016, the then CEO of the Co-Op group, Richard Pennycook, sought a 60% cut in his pay package as, he argued, his job had got simpler after a restructuring... These admissions cause embarrassment and are not the story the business elite want to tell. Right now, in fact, pleas for even bigger and better pay packages are being heard in the city. Julia Hogget, the CEO of the London Stock Exchange, has said that CEOs are getting paid at levels that are "significantly below global benchmarks". She fears an exodus of businesses and executives who feel greater rewards will be found elsewhere, especially in the US, where top CEO's pay is on average about three times the level to be found at FTSE 100 companies. The High Pay Centre reports that, in 2022, the UK's...

  The website of Eton College promises that "Eton believes in equal opportunity for everyone irrespective of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, belief, disability or social demographic background." Before you dispatch your progeny to claim their free first-class education at this socialist paradise by the Thames, it is worth checking the "fees" section of the same website which takes a rather less egalitarian line on the issue of "social and demographic background"... A battle over private education looms. Concerned parents are already wondering whether they can pay next year's fees in advance of the next election. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the coming row it will at least expose an important modern hypocrisy: for all their elaborate trumpetings to the contrary, private schools are not instruments of social justice. That they have come to believe they are is richly amusing. But it is also concerning... Allegory of Virtue 1640-1649 Alber...

  Who could have predicted Hollywood's sudden flowering? When Keanu Reeves publishes his debut novel, The Book of Elsewhere , in July, he will join a swelling cohort of celebrity writers. Tom Hanks, Sean Penn and Millie Bobby Brown have all published novels in recent years... The reason is not, I think, a sudden upgrade in the intellectual calibre of our celebrities... The relevant factor is a new and extreme deference to the power of the "personal brand" which originated on social media but now pervades our culture. Possession of a "platform" or a "following" is now a licence to do pretty much whatever you like creatively, regardless of your talent. Consider publishing. Modern  Britain's bestselling novelist, Richard Osman, is loved as a writer but it is relevant to his success that he was a famous TV personality first. Children's fiction is beset with celebrities exploiting their name recognition. David Walliams is the most famous example... ...