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

Notre Dame, another one, yes.

And also the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Yeah.

But so that was a kind of a very long term thought that, you know, in the cubby holes of my mind, I kind of worried away at it over the decades.

But it also coincided with other long term preoccupations about the relationship between the generations and the way that there can be an overshadowing

What I was trying to do with Leila, and I'm really glad to hear that that character resonated with you because she is quite deliberately a very, very difficult character to love.

And she is a sort of embodiment of, I suppose, in the relationship between her and Mr. Berman, there's the embodiment of one generation's self-conscious disgust with

the present and the future.

Is this what we have?

Is this what we have done?

Is this what we've created?

While at the same time, hating themselves for feeling this way about the young, about the world that is new, that is being created.

They want to love.

We want to love what is new and yet we constantly find ourselves recoiling from it, whether it is the world around us, the newly built or the newly born or the grown up, but at the same time loving and also wanting to love that which is new.

And it's very, very difficult without seeming like, without the book coming across as cold and weird to make an obvious comparison between a monument and a person, between a monument and a society.

And so I guess that was what...

was difficult for me.

Yeah, very difficult.

Maybe that's why it took so long.

Well, when you write a book, you don't think about how ambitious it is.

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