While we were away in South Australia, I took a couple of paperbacks with me to read, rather than an e-reader.

J likes to sit and sketch, and in the bright sun of a South Australian autumn an e-ink screen can be hard on the eyes, and a LED tablet style display too washed out to be any use, while paper, well, it’s pleasant to sit in the shade and read a paper book.

One of the books I took with me was the 1990 Booker prize winner, Possession, by A S Byatt.

It’s a good read, and second hand paperback copies are widely available for a few bucks from your preferred retailer, but one interesting thing that stands out is how it describes a vanished world.

It’s a tale of scholarly research into the lives of two mid Victorian litterati.

Today such work would involve carting laptops to libraries, late night email and video conferences, and possibly a little bit of topic modelling along the way.

There is none of that. No computers, no internet, instead people meet in coffee shops and send and receive letters.

There are no mobile phones, no one using camera apps to sneak a copy of a crucial letter.

None of the stuff we would consider normal.

Other aspects of the research trade are much as they are today with underpaid research assistants, strange proprietary people hoarding their work and unwilling to share in case a competitor should gain an advantage and perhaps end up with extra funding.

In fact the research trade is probably more cut throat today than it was then.

I’m guessing the novel was written in the late 1980s before the internet escaped computer science departments and reflects the author’s own experience of university life of a time just before computers were suddenly everywhere …