James Meek

speaker

486 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 15 Jun

James Meek’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

One of the things I was trying to do with Layla was, and to some extent with the housing estate that she is, you know, in her quiet, determined way, trying to persuade her father of the virtue of, yes.

No, no, she's just somebody who shows people around the show homes.

On the new estate.

I do have this, Mr. Berman is a contradictory character.

He's very aware that he is, you know, I've embodied it in this idea of comfort and rigor.

And our relationship to the present, I think, is that divided.

I think if we are humane, if we're wise enough to know, then we are divided.

We know that that which is new is often repellent to us.

But we also know that we are not being fair, we're not being just, we're too quick to condemn.

And I wanted to embody that in Mr. Berman's relationship to Leila.

But he knows he's wrong to be a snob about the things that she does.

And he even suspects that he may be wrong about the cities that we are building, that we are building now.

I don't know if...

The older people in the audience have had the same experience that I have.

It seems to me that there does come a certain point in your life when you will come across something that has been built, which you despised when it was new.

And then suddenly, almost overnight, you think, actually,

It's all right.

It is, but I mean, it's such a weird transformation.

You start to quite like things.

I have this particular memory of driving through some 1970s private housing estate, which up until that day, I would have thought nasty.

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