On average, someone in the US spends 3 hours and 43 minutes every day on their phone. Does this sound familiar? With most of us being lured into our phones during the pandemic, we may well be spending an inordinate amount of time scrolling into the dead of night.

If you own an Apple device, you may even be lucky enough to be treated to a screentime round up every week — informing you of how much time you’ve wasted. However, I don’t have an Apple phone. …

What do books mean to you? Chances are if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, they mean quite a lot. For one, they are far more than just physical objects that are nice to look at.

Certain books can remind us of specific moments in our lives and be a way to navigate our past. I have books that bring up certain memories, such as reading The Great Gatsby at Sixth Form and suddenly realising the power and beauty of words. There will be moments in our lives where we remember reading certain books and feeling a certain way.

The experience…

Some people say you can only understand the present by knowing about the past. After all, it’s how we got from A-Z. The systems we have in place today across the world — government, transport, and various forms of leisure and past time — are from the accumulation of decades of history and development.

Our present, therefore, is inextricably shaped by the past. This quote by Edmund Burke was ingrained in me from the moment I started studying my history degree,

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

By reading about the past, we can better understand…

Picture this. You’ve just whizzed through the latest book you are reading, only to jump straight onto the next one on your to be read pile. The second you read the last line on the final page, it’s over, and you move on. Without taking a breather or pausing to reflect on what you’ve just read, you’re immediately plunged into a different world.

This was me as a teenager. I couldn’t get enough of reading; it was almost an addiction. I had to be reading to get the high. I barely paused for breath in between reads, and as a…

When I was younger, I imagined that I would be working in a fancy office and travelling to work in a stiff suit every day by the time I approached my mid-twenties. I didn’t know what I would be doing exactly, but this is how I imagined it to be.

Some graduates feel pressured into securing a corporate, office-based or city job once three years at university are over. It’s considered a right of passage to some people, and it certainly was for me — for a while. …

Harry Potter was one of the first series I fell in love with. I remember being curled up in bed, beyond my ‘bedtime’ reading The Order of the Phoneix and later hiding under the covers in the dark, feeling afraid of death eaters. The series brought a lot of enjoyment to me as a young reader, but it has been a while since I revisited them as an adult.

During England’s third lockdown, I found myself in a reading slump. Every time I picked up a book, I could barely concentrate for five minutes before scrolling on my phone. Because…

You probably never knew I liked writing letters; it wasn’t something we ever shared. I haven’t written a letter in a long time, so this might be really rubbish, but I thought I would give it a go anyway.

So it has been over a year since you left us — including two birthdays — and what a hole you left. After we said goodbye, the whole world was plunged into chaos, and all of us had to grieve in private, many of us, without the support of our closest family and friends within range. …

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In our day to day lives, we can all get bogged down with what we’re not doing rather than what we are. This can give us a false impression of the progress we’ve made and can obscure how far we have come.

The pandemic and the new working from home culture that has evolved from it has disrupted the balance between work and downtime, and for many of us, on furlough or spending more time at home, the pressure to fit something in at every hour of the day can be a lot.

When you’re not doing anything particularly ‘productive’…