About English literature

A thoughtful review, by James Marriott in the New Statesman, of Stefan Collini’s book about the glory days of Eng Lit, ending with the author’s pessimistic moan: 

In time... it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one’s own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.

and then the critic’s resigned observation that this time is already upon us. Marriott gets a bit over 2,000 words to work with, which is pretty generous these days, but would be considered a mere footnote by the sort of academics that Collini invokes, the likes of FR Leavis and IA Richards. But then Marriott gets half an hour to stretch his case out in the video. Which rather proves his point, no?