James Marriott seems to me to be cut from cloth that has fallen out of fashion. He is no proselytiser for any particular political creed, but a sceptical observer and interpreter of the political battlegrounds of our age. More into Keats than clickbait, his instinct is to think deeply rather than rush to formulate a viral opinion.
Marriott is a columnist at The Times, where he reviews books and podcasts and writes about society and ideas. We meet at the British Library, where he has been working on his upcoming book, The New Dark Ages, due to be published in September. Marriott’s debut expands on his Substack essay, ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’, which sparked debate with its exploration of how the decline in reading may impact Western civilisation, democracy, and intellectual thought.
As we speak, it strikes me that Marriott’s words seem careful and considered, almost as if prewritten. We begin by discussing his upbringing in Newcastle. He inherited his interest in poetry and literature from his father, an English professor. As a child, he dreamed of studying at Oxford; an aspiration that was fulfilled when he got a place to read English Literature at Lincoln College. “Like a lot of people who went to Oxford, I had all kinds of fancy ideas about what it was going to be like”, Marriott says. “It was going to be like Brideshead Revisited. I was going to make all these marvellous, eccentric friends.” Marriott was understandably disappointed when myth turned out to be a poor guide to reality. He’s disarmingly honest about his initial difficulty at Oxford: “I felt very lonely and shy. It took me a year and a half to really start enjoying university.”
Journalism was not Marriott’s first aspiration. “After I graduated university, I was full of the idea of being a poet”, he explains. “But it quickly became clear that being a poet is not a viable career option in the 21st century, so I abandoned that.” Marriott’s route into journalism was somewhat unconventional: his first job was in the rare books trade at Bernard Quaritch Ltd in London. He found himself surrounded by priceless manuscripts – including a first edition of Milton, a legal document signed by Napoleon, and a children’s book dating to 1807. It was, he emphasises, “an amazingly fortunate position to be in”.
Marriott, however, had his sights set on The Times Books section. He wrote reviews in smaller outlets until he was noticed by the paper’s Literary Editor, who took him on. Sheer luck and persistent determination played their parts. “I’m aware things could have gone very differently for me”, Marriott reflects. “I could easily have not ended up being a journalist – life is all sliding doors and coincidences.”
Column-writing, he admits, is an odd discipline. “It’s partly a nightmare to say something new every week.” A colleague told him that “every opinion column is either obvious or wrong”. It’s a worry he can never truly escape. “You always fear, am I just saying something incredibly obvious and incredibly banal?” Yet Marriott is keen to emphasise the rewards of his job. The lifestyle is strikingly similar to that of an Oxford humanities undergraduate. “I spend my entire life reading books, trying to have ideas, turning in my weekly essay”, he says, before adding with a smile: “It’s a pretty lucky way to live.”
That life, however, exists within a media landscape in flux. No longer are print newspapers a product of widespread consumption; Apple News is simply more convenient than buying a Times subscription. The world in which books and broadsheets claimed cultural preeminence is no more. Journalists have had to adapt. Indeed, Marriott tells me that he is scheduled to film two TikToks the following week. It is hard to imagine his restrained, literary style competing with the churn of short-form video and algorithmically amplified outrage. “Being a newspaper columnist 20 years ago was a big deal, and columnists were household names”, he observes. Yet today, they occupy a smaller corner of a far more crowded media ecosystem.
Marriott fears that lost amidst this shift is a shared cultural and moral reality. “Historically, newspapers helped form the nature of a modern nation state”, Marriott explains. “Everybody read the same newspapers in the same language, and disparate groups began to think of themselves as a nation.” Now, as reading declines and media fragments, people are less likely to identify with a national public and more likely to belong to diffuse political tribes. “Can you have modern national democratic politics in that environment?”, Marriott asks. “I think we genuinely don’t know.”
But the fracturing of the media landscape is only one strand of a broader unravelling of the liberal world order. The technocratic, optimistic politics of the post-WWII era have been replaced by the populist politics of the present. The edifice of democracy is cracking; we are watching a page of history turning.
Does Marriott think the post-war liberal consensus is gone for good? “I think we’re hurtling into a new era”, he replies. “Since the end of the Second World War, we’ve experienced 100 years of liberalism, stability, functioning democracy. And I think we can too easily assume it will last forever.” Yet he cautions that “the lesson of history is that societies change all the time”. He points to 600 years of social transformations – “the printing press, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution.” Throughout this history, he says, there has not been an example of “an ideology as dominant as liberalism fading out and coming back”. It’s that recognition of the transience of our political age that so often characterises Marriott’s writing.
So, why do people often view liberal democracy as the natural endpoint of political evolution? “In the late ‘90s, it wasn’t a mad thing to think”, Marriott notes. “The world was becoming more democratic and more wealthy. Everything just seemed to be working very well.”
He adds that we are prone to a “human bias”: “We get used to our lives, and we find the idea of change very hard to believe. We’ve read our local sense of stability into a kind of wider universal law that just doesn’t exist.” Marriott argues that the universe does not bend inevitably towards liberal democracy; there is no ‘end point’ of political evolution, only the volatile vicissitudes of political systems rising and falling. All political systems eventually decay, so why should democracy be the exception?
Before political systems fall, the habits of thought that sustain them begin to unravel. In his viral 2025 essay, Marriott argued that we are living through a counter-revolution against reading driven by smartphones. His argument is not simply that people are reading less, but that this shift alters the very structure of thought. Put simply, the way we communicate shapes what we can communicate.
We are not, Marriott points out, short of information. Quite the opposite: we are overwhelmed by it. In pre-literate societies, forgettable ideas simply disappeared. Today, the bulk of information sinks into what Marriott terms the “great swamp of the archive”. This is an information environment which prizes memorability over accuracy and contrarianism over nuance. One is rewarded for being striking, provocative and emotionally charged.
Populism is a natural beneficiary of this shift. In our conversation, Marriott points out that social media algorithms “favour a particular kind of content, which is angry, loud, simplified”. In contrast, “broadsheet newspapers traditionally provide nuanced context and analysis, and that just doesn’t fly”. Whereas writing rationalises thought, short-form videos allow one to bypass logical argument. Populism, with its emphasis on style of communication and simplicity of message over substance of policy, is uniquely situated to take advantage of the social media algorithm.
Yet Marriott maintains that this is not the whole story of populism’s ascendance. An inescapable reality is simply that social media has democratised the information environment. The erosion of traditional media has removed the “gatekeepers” that once filtered and framed public discourse. “Liberal ideas have been imposed in society artificially from above, via the BBC and The Times”, Marriott suggests. Yet now, those very institutions are receding from their former preeminence in public life. Without these institutions and norms, “liberal ideas don’t come naturally to people”, he explains. “I don’t think people are behaving like good liberals when you throw them all together in a big mass on Twitter.”
“Human beings are naturally dogmatic”, he adds. “People don’t like changing their minds. They don’t like having their points of view challenged.” Yet humans are responsive to environments that reward open-mindedness. Perhaps, then, the problem with social media is not that it reveals our innate nature, but that it incentivises and amplifies our most illiberal instincts.
At the same time, the beliefs people hold are not always adopted through careful reasoning. Marriott points out that columnists writing about ideas can “overestimate how committed people are” to them. “We are social apes, and we care much more about social status than we do about the truth”, he observes. “We are much more likely to adopt ideas because they seem status-enhancing and will help us fit in in our groups.
“For a lot of people, there was no point at which they changed their mind and wrestled with the ideas of progressivism.” What actually occurred, he suggests, is that people suddenly believed these ideas “because everyone else believed it”. Ideas are often embraced less for their intrinsic merit than for the social advantages they confer and the sense of belonging they provide. What looks like ideological conviction may, in practice, be a form of social alignment.
This presents a paradox for the columnist. To write about ideas is to assume that ideas matter and that people arrive at their beliefs through argument and reflection. Yet the more seriously one takes ideas, the harder it becomes to value how most people come to hold them.
As our conversation ends, Marriott seems acutely aware that the world which shaped him is receding. This sense is only sharpened when I point out that he, as a columnist, is writing for an audience that is increasingly insouciant about reading. “I’m feeling a bit sad watching something that I grew up believing was the most important thing in life turning into an antiquarian endeavour”, Marriott says, a flash of despondency crossing his face. He adds that his interest in poetry is, in this age, seen as “an eccentric hobby, like collecting Victorian China”. One can only hope that the cloth he’s cut from comes back into fashion.
