David Ellison
speaker
414 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2018
last heard 16 Jun
David Ellison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
No.
And, of course, the risk, the terrible risk in all of this, is that the more trainspottery it gets, the more determined you get to pull the author up.
And, in fact, I've got in my heavily marked-up copy one bit which, rather obnoxiously, I've written, Aha!
which is where I caught him out because he mentioned something about the workshop of filthy creation, which is a line from Frankenstein, which is published in 1818.
So too late.
Yeah, terrible nerd.
Yeah, yeah.
And oftentimes those details arrive in moments of disorientation or stress.
So some of the most vivid writing in the book occurs under the influence of opium, when there's a final kind of unburdening and unleashing of Lacroix's capacity to speak and to see.
And that's quite horrific, but also very detailed, very interesting.
Well, they are the friends.
I should mention also that the novel is haunted by the prospect of it becoming a kind of allegory.
Everybody's name seems freighted with significance.
So the friends, F-R-E-N-D-S, are a family who've signed on, slightly reluctantly in one case, to what we would now call an intentional community, but back then was a kind of free-thinking society, which certainly had more liberal views towards sex and a general kind of scepticism and interest in science.
And they've pitched up on this remote Hebridean island.
Vegetarians.
I didn't worry about what they were eating.
Yes, yes.
Being a vegetarian in early 19th century Scotland would be quite a challenge, I would imagine.
Even now, it's a bit of a challenge.
Showing 341–360 of 414 · page 18 of 21
← Previous
Next →