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“... outside, the world that forms the books.Writing about Christie in the LRB (20 December 2018), John Lanchester argued that part of the reason she’s still vastly more read than her contemporaries is that she was less invested in her subjects, and therefore less likely to break ‘the containment field of the detective genre’ by making ideological ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by ...”

“... as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale ...”

“... do wish I didn’t feel so fat’; ‘Every day I feel worse. Miserable loneliness’; ‘Elsa Lanchester to supper last night. Not a success. Don had fixed shrimp jambalaya and Elsa immediately said she couldn’t eat garlic and implied a reproof because I hadn’t remembered this’; ‘Well, of course, everything is all right today – it really is, I ...”

“... of a number of recent books by Andreas Malm, opens by quoting an observation made in the LRB by John Lanchester (22 March 2007) that terrorism had thus far been markedly absent from the climate movement.* That might have been a sign of the times. There was little appetite in the years after 2001 for discussion of the merits of terrorism. Even if the ...”

“... You’d think we would know by now. But we don’t know. In a recent essay in the LRB (3 January), John Lanchester said the simplest summary of the state of knowledge in macroeconomics is ‘nobody knows anything.’ The same is true of macro-politics. In micro-politics, as in microeconomics, we are drowning in knowledge. The minutiae of the inner ...”

“... the giant vigilante organisation which centres on Pietersburg. Founded by a black businessman, John Magolego, Mapogo now has 35,000 paid up members, 10,000 of them white – it’s a booming business. It moves into an area, rounds up criminal suspects, beats the hell out of them, drags them behind vans on rocky roads or dangles them over crocodile-infested ...”

“... racing might be illegal but the solo ‘speed merchants’ were getting away with it. That early Lanchester which ‘sang like a six-inch shell across the Sussex Downs’ contained (in the back seat) Rudyard Kipling, a bit of a road-hog who had the nerve to proclaim that the car had at last brought a major blood sport to Britain. His fellow poet and ...”

“... when as the administrator of an asylum he connived in the kidnapping of a young woman, Edith Lanchester, who had been driven mad, or so her family believed, by ‘over-education’. Lanchester’s plight – disenfranchised, yet thoroughly surveilled – goes some way to explaining the enthusiasm of Murray’s 624 ...”

“... central to military thinking. In The Aircraft in Warfare (1915), the British mathematician F.W. Lanchester suggested that the critical aim of an act of warfare was to overwhelm ‘the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community’, after which ‘the city may be destroyed in toto.’ Lanchester also came up with the ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... and lyrics; he’d even written a couple of (unproduced) plays. Charles Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, partly resentful of her husband’s evident fascination with his movie’s star, claimed that Mitchum was forever using ‘big, long words’ to impress Laughton. Yet at the same time he couldn’t stop himself from playing the vulgarian and ...”

“... signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used ...”

“... tree at Stapledown: somewhere there still exists a glorious snapshot of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, who took it over, bursting happily out of one of its upper windows. And all this variety comes to a head, the whole place bursting out of embracing trees, at the estuary township of Portmeirion. Most often puffed off nowadays as ‘Italianate’ or ...”