John Lanchester
speaker
548 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 27 Jun
John Lanchester’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
But it did that thing of plucking my sleeve.
And then I said, well, it won't leave me.
And I've come to trust that and to...
to think that well if there's something about that idea that slightly gets in my head i can't quite shake it off it keeps coming back i can't quite explain why it did but it does that then to trust that it might have that effect on the reader too if it won't leave me alone maybe it won't leave the reader alone yeah um but there is definitely a different mental category um i can't do oh that's an interesting phenomenon in the world let's write a novel about it
It just doesn't... I mean, Will Sutherland's a man once saying that for Halloween, if his neighbours didn't answer when he went trick-or-treating, he'd write long satirical novels about them.
Okay, well, I think I've noticed, because when I'm in the middle of a novel, I don't read much contemporary fiction, or indeed any.
I read addictively all the time, but not that, and then kind of catch up.
And the thing that I have noticed that's been rather surprising is that the number of continental European things that have been written that are actually really funny.
Because I don't traditionally think, oh, I feel like a laugh.
I know what, I'll go to the contemporary European literature section.
Exactly.
And I just wondered if there's a slight shift that the Anglophone novel is going through men who've been quite so serious and straight-faced.
Whereas, I mean, the thing I often think is that, you know, there are some actors who always look like they're having a poo.
They just have this look on their face.
They're sort of like that.
And sometimes the Anglophone novel's a bit like that.
It's got that look on its face.
Too much effort.
Exactly.
And of the wrong kind.
Showing 381–400 of 548 · page 20 of 28
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