John Lanchester

John Lanchester is the author of six novels – The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips, Fragrant Harbour, Capital, The Wall and Look What You Made Me Do, due in March 2026 – 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.

From The Blog

Google Suggests

13 January 2010

Google are in the news for saying that they might pull out of China, and/or stop censoring searches on its Chinese search engine – a topic of great sensitivity since they opened for (censored) business in China in 2006. But there's more than one sort of censorship, and those who think that self-censorship is one of the worst types will enjoy this. It compares the suggestions made by the search engine when you type in 'Christianity is' or 'Hinduism is' or 'Judaism is' or 'Buddhism is' with what happens when you type in 'Islam is'. It's more noteworthy given that the search suggestions in general roam wild and free. Type in 'Why is there' into the box and Google leaps to complete the thought with 'a dead Pakistani on my couch'.

Short Cuts: Kraft eats Cadbury

John Lanchester, 7 January 2010

When economic times are hard, big companies take the opportunity to eat smaller ones. This process does not respect national boundaries, particularly when an economy is as open to outsiders as Britain’s. This is an old story, so it’s hard to see quite why the prospective takeover of Cadbury by Kraft, the American food conglomerate, has got people going quite as much as it has....

Bankocracy: Lehman Brothers

John Lanchester, 5 November 2009

The collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers over the weekend of 13-14 September last year was an event of world-historical magnitude. What was so important about it wasn’t the local havoc it caused, the loss of jobs and livelihoods and savings; it wasn’t even the fact that the US Treasury’s decision to allow the bank to go bankrupt triggered a full-blown stock market...

From The Blog

Touché!

8 October 2009

The flag of the pre-colonial Benin empire (via kottke.org): Isn't it weirdly like that Thurber drawing with the caption 'Touché!’?

Short Cuts: Caster Semenya

John Lanchester, 8 October 2009

Sports administration is one of those jobs which have built into them the fact that they attract attention only when things go wrong. A school sports day takes quite a bit of organising; anything bigger, and the complications grow exponentially. Events such as Wimbledon or the World Cup are mechanisms of extraordinary complexity, in which most of the moving parts are human, and these events...

Podcasts & Videos

Podcast

The Omicron Wave

John Lanchester, Rupert Beale and Thomas Jones

14 December 2021

John Lanchester and Rupert Beale talk to Tom about the spread of the latest variant, where we might stand in the story of Covid, and the failures of the state in coping with the pandemic.

Podcast

The Long Way Round

John Lanchester and Thomas Jones

13 April 2021

John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about his experience of being on a cargo ship blocked from entering the Suez Canal in 1967, his subsequent journey round the Cape of Good Hope, and the modern-day...

Podcast

Maigret Returns

John Lanchester and Thomas Jones

2 June 2020

John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about the author of the Maigret stories, whose output was so prodigious that even he didn't know how many books he wrote.

Video

The LRB at 40

Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Bennett, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, Yun Sheng and Nicholas Spice

11 October 2019

We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.

Podcast

John Lanchester

David Runciman, Helen Thompson and John Lanchester

13 April 2017

David and Helen talk to John Lanchester about banks, money and power. Why have so few bankers gone to jail since the financial crisis? Can the Euro survive? Should we be more frightened of unaccountable...

Pieces about John Lanchester in the LRB

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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