John Lanchester

John Lanchester is the author of five novels – The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips, Fragrant Harbour, Capital and The Wall – and a collection of ghost stories, Reality, and Other Stories. He has also written a memoir, Family Romance, and two books about the financial system, Whoops!, and How to Speak Money. His first piece for the LRB, on Martin Amis, appeared in 1987, when he was a junior member of staff at the paper. He has since written well over a hundred pieces on subjects including agoraphobia, Don De Lillo, Anthony Powell, Ian Rankin, Ian Fleming, Rupert Murdoch, Google, Wal-Mart, Alastair Campbell’s diaries, Cityphilia and Cityphobia, the failure of the banking system in 2008, Marx, getting hooked on Game of Thrones, the PPI scandal, the robotified future, bitcoin, Facebook, Agatha Christie, Maigret, Universal Basic Income, the shipping industry, cheating in sport, Covid, statistics and the uselessness of modern finance.

Short Cuts: Labour’s Straitjacket

John Lanchester, 17 April 2025

Through the post​ arrives an artefact of a vanished civilisation, trailing that nimbus of mystery and sadness and forsaken possibility that belongs to reminders of a world we have lost. It comes in the form of a cheque from the state, made out to my son, for £1024. The cheque isn’t actually signed by Gordon Brown, but it might as well be. The Child Trust Fund was a New Labour...

For Every Winner a Loser: What is finance for?

John Lanchester, 12 September 2024

It is easy​ to misunderstand what contemporary finance is and does. Common sense, and the textbook, both say that finance is the business of moving money from A to B. There are times when money in place A, a saver’s bank account, say, would be usefully deployed in place B, a business needing cash to expand, or an individual wanting a mortgage to be able to buy somewhere to live....

He-Said, They-Said: Crypto Corruption

John Lanchester, 2 November 2023

It’s​ a 19th-century story; it’s a 21st-century story. The process takes a decade and a bit. A philosophical idea starts in Oxford, spreads rapidly, finds a believer who becomes famous and grows in fame with him, thrives despite loud criticism, and then undergoes a huge scandal as the famous person does something which confirms the charges the movement’s detractors have...

Get a rabbit: Don’t trust the numbers

John Lanchester, 21 September 2023

At a dinner​ with the American ambassador in 2007, Li Keqiang, future premier of China, said that when he wanted to know what was happening to the country’s economy, he looked at the numbers for electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending. There was no point using the official GDP statistics, Li said, because they are ‘man-made’. That remark, which we know about thanks to...

Picture​ the following age-old scene: a writer sitting at a kitchen table, pretending to work. Set it forty years ago. The Conservatives are in power and everything is broken, but our subject is the writer’s stuff. On the table is a typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner....

Hong Pong: John Lanchester

Thomas Jones, 25 July 2002

First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now...

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On the Run: John Lanchester

Adam Phillips, 2 March 2000

The name is ordinary, so the book announces itself as a book about no one special; though, of course, when men without qualities become the subjects of novels a certain gravity (if not grace) is...

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