Tapas is one of the world’s most civilised drinking and eating traditions. John Lanchester Read Quote
Nando’s is a casual restaurant rather than a fast-food one – another aspirational touch. The food is energetically spiced, where so many of its competitors are bland and grilled to order, where the competition fries food and then lets it sit around. John Lanchester Read Quote
Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme ‘Great British Menu?’ John Lanchester Read Quote
Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world – if you don’t think about why it’s so cheap. John Lanchester Read Quote
There is a moral underpinning to economics. And the kinds of questions that it asks and the kinds of solutions it proposes do seem to me to belong in a more humanistic framework. John Lanchester Read Quote
I have a horror of going down dead ends, which you can easily do with a novel, spending months on it and then realising that it’s all wrong. It’s demoralising, because you don’t get the time back. John Lanchester Read Quote
Once you learn to ‘speak’ money – which is what I felt I did through the research that led me to write ‘Whoops!’ – you start to see it at work all around you. It’s like a language, a code written on the surface of things; it’s in flow all around us, all the time. John Lanchester Read Quote
I think ‘community,’ in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term. John Lanchester Read Quote
A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us. John Lanchester Read Quote
I grew up in Hong Kong, and London used to seem very gray: the sky was gray, the buildings were gray, the food was incredibly gray – the food had, like, new kinds of grayness specially invented for it. John Lanchester Read Quote
