Catherine Nixey

speaker

366 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Catherine Nixey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Pulp fiction v the classics: summer reading · 25 May 2026 podcast

thought about what everyone is saying and thinking at the time and they've written it down and it feels truthful.

I don't want to get all Hemingway, uh, but you know, it feels like it's right.

It feels like somebody has had that thought and put it down.

To prepare for this, I was reading George Orwell's Politics in the English Language.

And it's an essay where he talks about how bad writing feels like people have just taken together strips of language and pasted them down.

And that's what bad writing feels like.

You know, their heart leapt, they lurched to the left.

You you can feel the phrases.

They're like, they're not being freshly minted.

It's like jamming together fridge poetry.

And I I think the good writers are the ones who are thinking, they're doing that hard thing.

Can I just ask what does that mean?

I don't think I've played a video game since I was eight.

What do you mean they're like a video game?

This is one of the reasons why I don't like sci-fi.

I don't I don't want that word.

And uh here it is.

But I think I think one of the things that a good escapist novel does, that a good novelist does, is that they don't write a book, they create a world, and that you want to step into it.

You know the minute you open a Jane Austen, even if you haven't read it, you know if you've read three, you know them all, more or less.

If you've read a Jilly Cooper, you step into Rutshire, you step into Blankshire in Jane Austen, you step into Dickens's London, you know where you are.

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