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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we choose some of our favorite pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud. I'm Petra Gibbons and on

this week's podcast, Philip Womack shares his own experience of conflicts over

university reading lists and asks, is it really too much to ask students to read a book?

Ian Thompson reads his letter from Albania and contemplates how much the Balkan nation has changed

since the dictatorship of Enver Hodja. The director of Big Brother Watch, Silky Carlo,

reveals the surprising rise of supermarket surveillance. Discussing a tradition that appears to have waned,

Francis Young provides his notes on Halloween fairies. And finally, Rory Sutherland worries

that Britain may soon face a different sort of migrant crisis. Up first, Philip Womack.

The Shakespeare scholar, Sir Jonathan Bate, recently claimed that students are struggling to read long books.

Depressingly, he's right.

I could have told him the same thing five years ago when I was teaching at a well-respected Russell Group University. The problem

isn't that students won't read Moby Dick in five days. It's that even if you give them what they want,

they'll still find fault. This all points to a tussle at the heart of modern education. Do you

cave into the blighters or not? To my surprise,

when convening a BA course on children's literature, I discovered that some of my students

balked at reading children's books. The course looked at the whole caboodle from the Romantics

to the present day.

It wasn't a doss.

...