“Finding room to read at the British Library is no mean feat for established users, as seats are increasingly filled by twittering students fiddling with their phones, says John Sutherland” in a commentary for The Guardian. The problem, he says, is that the library — “the dome in Bloomsbury [that] suckled the nation’s intellect” — is no longer “at pains to keep at bay London University’s 100,000 students.” Whereas the Library used to keep “users down to manageable levels through a series of polite, but formidable, barriers,” such as interviews about why you wanted to use the facility, now even “sixth formers can now get a reader’s ticket.” If the situation had been the same previously, he writes, “Karl Marx would have to go to King’s Cross station to write Das Kapital. Virginia Woolf would have to go home to the room of her own. No entry today, Mr Thackeray.” As to why the Library is allowing more students, Sutherland says, “More users means more clout, and more funds. Lift the portcullis: let in the students. And, if that doesn’t work, let in the winos and the street people.” In the end, says Sutherland, “the current problems at the British Library . . . are a grim portent of what lies ahead for the country’s industrial-intellectual infrastructure: its universities.”