Most young people reject politics altogether: a 2013 study of political engagement by the Hansard Society found that although some two-thirds of adults under 35 declare themselves interested in "current affairs", only one-third confessed an interest in "politics".
Indeed, he is so much a celebrity that Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester who wrote a biography of Cleopatra four years ago, says that for some aloof colleagues, confessing an interest in Tutankhamen is "the equivalent to confessing a preference for television soaps over Shakespeare".
An outgoing man who favors broad jokes, Sharp told McEwan that he was a football fan; his brother confessed to little interest.
My colleague Mark Singer has confessed his abiding interest in obituaries, which is abiding enough that he attended a conference of obituary junkies; Judith Thurman, another colleague, has written of her love of names, which, it should be noted, is an important subset of the obituary's pleasures.
Although half of respondents watched the televised leaders' debates in the 2010 election, making them one of the most popular ways of following the campaign, three-quarters of the audience were those who confessed to being interested in politics anyway.
One of the highlights of the recent Social Ad Summit was a panel of media buyers who confessed that currently advertiser interest in social advertising is driven more by curiosity than urgency (read this Clickz report for more highlights).
In an interview, Auerbach confessed that he lost interest in big-time managing in the early 1990s, preferring to stay in the background and concentrating on his pastimes, racquetball and his beloved cigar-smoking.
"The issue is, can you get the Flynn effect, plus education, to outrun the robots?" said Mr. Schmidt, who because of Google is a billionaire, and confessed his own self-interest in the matter.
I often write that new ad networks bore me as a prefix to profiling an interesting one, but lately I've been seeing enough interesting new approaches to online advertising that I'm going to confess a newfound interest in the field.
I must confess a personal interest.
When we meet, in the centre of London, Miller confesses that his interest in such grave matters is partly personal.
