A Defence of Useful Information
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition
stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff
shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the
ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us,
ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and
love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling
fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with
the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so
interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of
different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it
would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous
mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated
papers, such as Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the
illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most
