This isn’t about New Coke vs. Coke Classic, but it kind of is. What of old whatshisface and whoshewhatsit?

Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was) ran a poll to discover from its readers’ votes the “novelists who may be read in 2029″. Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky: John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), HG Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455) and JM Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it’s pleasing to note).

Why would our choices be so different from those of our grandparents? Because we see literature as “literature”, through the prism of literary criticism and A-level prescriptions. It’s “modernism” that was the big bang in the 1920s. Everyone knows that. In 2009.