Zoom and the lost art of interpretation
Online meetings have put paid to the richness of in-person conversation as everyone pussyfoots around each other
15 November 2020 - 18:33
The greatest of biographies, all 1,200 pages of it, is reducible to some quick flurries of dialogue. When the star of The Life of Samuel Johnson speaks unimpeded, you can almost picture James Boswell and the rest gazing thirstily at the alehouse taps. The experience for the reader is hardly less of a drag. It is when their jousting cross-talk starts that the myth of Georgian London, each tavern an intellectual smithy, becomes not just plausible, but alive...
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