How do you read? Not the skill you learned at junior school, but rather: how do you keep up with what we impressively call The Literature? I've met, over the years, just a few people who read systematically. By this, I mean people who sit down and read every page of every journal that they get in the post. Most of the rest of us, I suspect, have ‘the pile of guilt’ which is the stack of unread journals, mostly still in their cellophane wrapper, and which mock us in our homes or offices. I'd guess that the majority of people reading this are looking at it fresh from ‘the pile of guilt’. As a medical student I used clip interesting articles. As a junior doctor I used to kid myself that I might read an article in full on the second perusal of the journal. I'm much more honest with myself now; the pile of guilt …