Francis Spufford

There's a great sort of angry comic novel by Jonathan Coe called What a Carve-Up about Thatcherism, for example, and that will do the change into Thatcherism.

But the reason my book jumps on

to get past the problem of gradualness it wants to offer kind of before and after photos for each of the period so that we can see in a jump what it is that's changed in the fabric of the city in the way people work um and it's you know it's not just one set of changes it's change upon change upon change

The first bit, which, you know, looking back could seem like a traditional world now, is actually the post-war moment when deference and social rigidity in the English class system starts to melt.

And working class kids born in 1940 in London suddenly had kind of a million more different life chances than their parents had done, which gave me the chance to spread mine out through umpteen different jobs, including working

joe the musician who becomes nearly famous and is a rock star's girlfriend and nearly a rock star herself but ends up as a london music teacher there's lovely writing about music in this well it's music is the pulse of time in many ways it's a genuinely popular art it's the thing that everybody knows and it's the thing that that there are no barriers both to kind of hearing and to enter and to making so

Music had to be in there, but also the way that, in a funny way, the rock star destiny is one of the most blatant examples of the English class system changing.

I was thinking a lot of having read Keith Richards' autobiography, Life.

I know it's ghostwritten, but it is still a marvellous book.

The combination of Sir Keith and his extremely skilled ghostwriter, whoever he was, produced this terrific book, which is

comedy as he goes as he goes you know what it's like when you're up on the top of the chateau marmont at midnight and you think actually no keith i really don't um but it's also it's also just beautiful close-up social social history and you look at the pictures in that book and keith richard starts as a little boy in shorts eating spam sandwiches in black and white photographs of kind of working-class seaside holidays and then suddenly the 1960s happened um

And here's a loose eyeshadow wearing man in a military jacket off his head on umpteen substances and talking to muddy waters.

And you think only in that period could you have been carried from South London straight to the Mississippi Delta.

Yeah, the music had to be in there.

Don't know how I'd name it.

You know, it's partly but not entirely a religious tradition.

And I think of writers like Marilynne Robinson, for whom there is absolutely no contradiction between the most scrupulous realism and a sense of kind of redemption possible, redemption nearby.

She is a very important writer to me.

The series that began with Gilead are kind of touchstone novels for me.

But her first one, Housekeeping, which I read in the 1980s when I was 20 or so, and was completely blown away by it and thought, I could never do anything like that.