John Lanchester

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....

Larping, or live action role play, is a hobby in which people dress up as their preferred fantasy object – elves, goblins, Cavaliers v. Roundheads, Confederates v. Unionists, aliens, victims of a zombie apocalypse, intergalactic adventurers, und so weiter – and collectively participate in a shared imaginative world. The biggest Larps go on for days and involve thousands of...

Outsiders never get to locate the exact point a legitimate business crosses the line and starts cheating. That’s a pity, because it would be interesting to know what’s running through the mind of a Bernie Madoff or an Elizabeth Holmes on the first occasion they see the moral fork in the road, face the reality of their actions, and make the wrong choice. Or maybe what happens is an ethical blur, a rush and press of business, in which what feels like a temporary, fixable expediency, a white lie, over time and in retrospect calcifies into a mistake that can’t be undone, a life-defining crime.

It is simple common sense that failing to lock down early enough or hard enough causes a longer, harder lockdown later – a bias towards liberty logically involves earlier lockdown. But that was, and is, too much for many Tories to grasp. ... It isn’t always possible to draw a straight line from someone’s personal life to their public works. Johnson’s private life is his business. But one thing you can say about a man responsible for at least nine pregnancies by at least four different women is that he is prone to wishful thinking. That wishful thinking is the common theme in the government’s failures from spring 2020 to autumn 2020 to now. Johnson doesn’t want certain things to be true, so he acts as if they can be ignored. That strategy has worked for him in domestic politics. It was at the heart of his advocacy for Brexit. But it doesn’t work in economics, and it doesn’t work in dealing with a pandemic.