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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

talked more about her her direction yeah and well you do have one scene strange thing is in she is so conventional that's that's her kind of thing you know she's mainstream whatever the kind of the market says this is what she does but actually that is very subversive because she is just she's living a small footprint she's she's not about massive projects and construction and

Yes, and there are other moments as well when he reminds her momentarily of Ada.

And I would like to think that's when the reader will realise that he realises that he's been a bit of a fool.

Yeah, I mean, you do have to make these choices sometimes and it's quite difficult.

And I still wonder about the choice of making it, as you say, a nameless northern town.

And I could time myself in knots justifying that and go on and on.

But what can I say?

I just decided that London had to be the actual London and the northern town had to be not named.

And I mean, there are lots of reasons why

It would have been quite a different book if I'd said, oh, this is Burnley.

Oh, this is, you know, it's not Burnley.

But, and I have been to quite a lot of these places and often they do have beautiful and very little known buildings of their own.

I mean, I suppose...

The one that I always think about as a place I did spend a week to write about it for the London Review of Books was Grimsby, where they have this extraordinary tower on the docks.

And what's poignant about it is not only that it is like the tower in the book, it is a copy of an Italianate building from the pre-Renaissance era.

But you can't actually get to it easily because the whole of the docks has been closed off by Association British Ports, this privatized port company.

And, you know, it's just not on their agenda.

They have no reason, no incentive, no order to open the docks up to visitors.

So it just sits there.

You can see it in the distance, but you can't get any closer.

Showing 361–380 of 486 · page 19 of 25