You win or you die: ‘Game of Thrones’
John Lanchester, 6 June 2019
John Lanchester’s piece in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
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 – 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
20 May 2019
Game of Thrones is arguably responsible for a quarter of my not being able to speak Spanish. Has it been worth it?
The Case of Agatha Christie
John Lanchester, 20 December 2018
She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate. She believed in evil, not necessarily in a theological sense – that’s a topic she doesn’t explore – but as a plain fact about human beings and their actions.
Story: ‘Love Island’
John Lanchester, 2 August 2018
Iona headed out into the stairwell for a bit of an explore. This upper floor of the villa had six rooms leading off a gallery, with stairs running down one side and a skylight above and walls painted white. It was very bright. She knew without looking that the other rooms would be bedrooms, and that this meant there would be six of them in the villa. Three girls and three boys. She couldn’t see any cameras or mikes so whatever they did with them must be very very clever, super-clever, because she was certain she was being watched.
After the Fall: Ten Years after the Crash
John Lanchester, 5 July 2018
That’s where we are with markets: non-change change, in the form of bonus regulation and ring-fencing; no change or change for the worse in the case of complexity and shadow banking and too big to fail; and no overall reduction in the level of risk present in the system. We are back with the issue of impunity. For the people inside the system that caused a decade of misery, no change. For everyone else, a decade of misery, magnified by austerity policies. Note that austerity policies were not recommended by mainstream macroeconomists, who predicted that they would lead to flat or shrinking GDP, as indeed they did. Instead politicians took the crisis as a political inflection point – a phrase used to me in private by a Tory in 2009, before the public realised what was about to hit them – and seized the opportunity to contract government spending and shrink the state.
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
Running, Diving, Bleeding
John Lanchester and Thomas Jones
27 July 2021
John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about ‘visible’ cheating in sport, that is, the kind which is against the rules but within the ethos of the game, from diving in football to bodyline bowling in...
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...
Video
25 March 2021
Patricia Lockwood talks to John Lanchester about her debut novel No One is Talking About This.
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
14 October 2020
John Lanchester discusses his chilling collection of short stories, which explores the uncanniness of modern life through demonic phones, haunted selfie-sticks and other technology gone horribly wrong.
Podcast
Brexit Blues
John Lanchester
27 July 2016
John Lanchester reads his piece on the implications of the UK’s EU referendum.
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...
Podcast
Story: ‘Coffin Liquor’
John Lanchester
4 January 2018
Toby Jones reads John Lanchester’s ghost story.
Video
18 August 2016
George Monbiot and John Lanchester discuss Monbiot’s latest book, How Did We Get Into This Mess?, and assess the state we’re in now. The event was recorded at the London Review Bookshop on 7 July...
Video
Bitcoin and the Nature of Money
John Lanchester
21 April 2016
John Lanchester explains what bitcoin is, and what it tells us about money.
Podcast
Will the AI bubble burst?
John Lanchester and Thomas Jones
7 January 2026
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens...
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...
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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