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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
London Review Bookshop Podcast · James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me · 15 Jun 2026
podcast
Yes, he is, but he's not exactly his alter ego because he's kind of... He's perhaps a part, an aspect of Mr Berman's personality in the sense that... Mr Berman's desire.
...they've had these conversations, his desires, his frustrations.
And he has felt completely at liberty to sound off about the idea of taking action, destroying.
We've all met these kind of pub Marxists who talk about the revolution.
But are they going out and blowing up cathedrals or anything else?
No.
And that is the normal thing.
Mr Berman...
Even though he knows his friend, his young protege, is going off to do a demolition course, he doesn't put two and two together until it actually happens, until he's arrested.
I mean, I thought that... Well, you're right to go right beyond the actual text of the book.
No, I think he's always been a strange and passionate young man.
And I think that's clear in the book.
And we're not really given enough information to kind of trace his conversion step by step.
But I suppose if you want to look at it that way, Mr. Berman does mistake his practical radicalism for the kind of...
radicalism that he has himself.
Namely, he talks about it, but he doesn't actually do anything about it.
He has this series of losses as far as, from Raph's point of view, he loses his aunt.
He doesn't lose this beautiful old tower that him and Mr. Berman save in the town.
But then it turns out in a way he does lose it because having saved this beautiful tower, he then sees that the rest of the town is wrecked by developers.
So he loses that.
Showing 141–160 of 486 · page 8 of 25
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