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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was definitely less than two minutes because that's how long the timer is on my electric toothbrush.
But I think some of the things behind it I've been brooding about for a long time.
There's...
There's a sudden death in the book.
And my father died very suddenly.
I mean, decades ago.
But for the whole idea to have been kind of emerged fully formed, I think I must have been on some level looking for a way of processing that and using it imaginatively.
Exactly.
And then there's a couple of plot things, and one of them is about something being culturally ubiquitous.
And that was the thing I noticed.
Again, years ago, when the first sort of Game of Thrones mania took hold, I remember being in a tube compartment, being on the Northern Line.
There were five people in that carriage reading Game of Thrones.
And I remember thinking, wow, this thing about everybody paying attention to the same thing at the same time has really gathered momentum.
And that's in the book.
And then there was also a thing about private languages.
I was very interested in that.
And that, oddly enough, came out of, I wrote a thing for The Guardian a gazillion years ago.
about Edward Snowden and was reading the Snowden papers, which at that point were in New York because the ones in London had been destroyed by the police.
And I remember thinking,
that the state has always been able to intercept people's letters, hack phone calls, things like that.
Showing 81–100 of 548 · page 5 of 28
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