Gray Robert Brown

So she's pressing him as to what he would have done if nobody was spectating, right?

And Gabriel says, if there had been nobody there to see what happened, he would have run and got a boat and rode the boat round, implying that he wouldn't need to be seen as the big hero in the dramatic way that diving into the splash of the water makes him.

it wouldn't benefit him in the long run because there wouldn't be spectators and that this is what literary novelists do is they give you these moments of of metaphor and these microcosms that you're supposed to extrapolate out and understand the wider novel on the basis of that moment and that's exactly what westmacott's doing it's a testament to the quality of writing yeah it also made me think though

I wonder if you were confused by my notes here.

It feels to me like, speaking of how politics haven't really changed, it feels to me like those moments that win or lose an election.

So Gordon Brown saying that she was a bigoted woman is seen now as like that was the moment when he lost that election.

Or like Ed Miliband doing the gravestone of the commandments of what Labour would do.

Or eating a bacon sandwich weirdly.

Or...

I know the bus with the promise false and proved to be false and ultimately still yet to materialize promise of millions of pounds of funding for the NHS if we leave the EU was seen to be the moment that won the Brexit vote for the Brexiteers.

And it's those moments, you know, Christie knows that she knows that it's those moments in communities, the headline news.

that strike people to their heart and they make them vote a certain way.

I think that's a great example of it.

And the moment when Mr. Burt accosts Gabriel, there is speculation in the novel.

Is that the bit that we will then look back on and go, he lost that election because of his altercation with Mr. Burt?

Yeah.

You know, she knows all this.

She's so plugged into politics, not only in 1948, but seemingly in 2026.

Well, today, I mean, we talk about him today as a, you know, I have very conflicted feelings about Churchill.

I think many people do.