Andrew O'Hagan

Popular culture was always at the very centre of it for us.

I mean, music was our currency.

It was our language.

You know, it wasn't just a thing on the sideline or like elevator music or something playing in the background.

We gained an entire sense of self, our entire identity from the music that we liked.

The things we had in common were movies, music, you know, we could sit and discuss a novel all night, smoking cigarettes and listening to John Peel's famous Radio One radio show.

That was our culture.

And yet I'd never found that culture in a book with the exactitude that I think readers enjoy.

So sometimes you sit down and write a book because you want to read it yourself.

Well, one of the things I always loved about the American writer Don DeLillo was that he did that very thing I've tried to describe of putting the whole culture into his books.

He wrote a book called Libra, which is essentially a kind of novelistic version of

of the Kennedy assassination.

Its central character is Lee Harvey Oswald.

Libre is a sort of masterpiece of modern writing because it takes the whole culture and goes underneath.

There's a sound of the musical landscape is in there, television newsreels, cinema, mystery stories.

The whole sort of beat of America at that time has been worked into that book.

And that's a real inspiration for me.

I could do it right off the top of my head and it would be Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the great Scotsman.

And surprisingly, perhaps, a biography which I found on a shelf in a hairdresser's, and my mother was having her hair done when I was a child, and it was called Norma Jean by Fred Lawrence Skiles.