Lanchesteriana

Strong feelings of similarity-with-difference as I read these two fun interviews with John Lanchester! I have had a version of that conversation about eating octopus a number of times now - it's the only thing I don't eat on vaguely ethical grounds (in days of yore I found it extremely delicious, and grilled octopus really is my favorite food that I won't eat!) - it's not so much that it has a brain as that the brain is in the part that you eat....

(I also completely agree about the sublimity of Blood on the Tracks!)

The FT lunches with John Lanchester.

Lanchester's cultural highlights.

(My favorite song from that album.)

Money, freedom, anxiety

A great piece by John Lanchester at the FT on how he came to write a book about money (FT site registration required).

"The small drama of opening and eating sweets"

At the LRB, John Lanchester ponders Britain's history as the preeminent creator of cheap chocolate:

[A]ll the great chocolate bars are British, and the first of them, and still my favourite, was Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, invented in 1905. Other great British bars appeared in a burst of heroic creativity in the 1920s and 1930s: the Flake in 1920, Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut in 1928, Fry’s Crunchie in 1929, the Aero in 1935, then in 1937 no fewer than three masterpieces, the Rolo, the Kit Kat and Smarties. All British inventions. According to Roald Dahl: ‘In music, the equivalent would be the golden age of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In painting, it was the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance and the advent of Impressionism at the end of the 19th century; in literature, Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens.’