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" Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?' "
John Lanchester
Admit
Menu
Obsessed
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" It seems to me obviously axiomatic that markets are not magical, that they're organised in a range of regulated entities created by men. We decide in what we will have markets, and we decide how the rules work and how they'll conduct themselves. "
John Lanchester
Rules
Magical
Work
" Inequality in the developed world fell for most of the 20th century; we can make it fall for most of the 21st century, too. But it won't happen without sustained pressure on politicians from electorates. "
John Lanchester
Fall
Inequality
Most
" Hospitality is central to the restaurant business, yet it's a hard idea to define precisely. Mostly, it involves being nice to people and making them feel welcome. You notice it when it's there, and you particularly notice it when it isn't. A single significant lapse in this area can be your dominant impression of an entire meal. "
John Lanchester
Nice
You
Welcome
" We can all instinctively understand the idea of life insurance; most of us will feel an instinctive repugnance at the thought of the viatical industry, or 'dead peasants insurance.' As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far. "
John Lanchester
Ideas
Thought
Life
" There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money. "
John Lanchester
Money
Who
Us
" My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about. "
John Lanchester
Ability
Early
Amazing
" I don't think quantitative easing is deliberately misleading, but I do think it's suspiciously bland and reassuring. It doesn't sound like anything big, experimental, scary and strange - which is what many economists think it is. "
John Lanchester
Sound
Think
Big
" Most people find they have to worry about money; if you don't ever, then in some fundamental way, you are cut off from most people. "
John Lanchester
You
Find
Money
" To make three films out of one shortish book, they have to turn it into an epic, just as 'Lord of the Rings' is an epic. But 'The Hobbit' isn't an epic: its tone is intimate and personal, and although it's full of adventures and excitement, they're on a different scale to those of the bigger book. "
John Lanchester
Excitement
Personal
Book
" In the U.S., it is a crime to lie to a federal agent, and it's often this that sends people to jail over financial matters. "
John Lanchester
Jail
Crime
Financial
" My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy. "
John Lanchester
Standard
Order
Chicken
" Celebrity farmer. Now there's a phrase that should be an oxymoron. There are farmers on both sides of my family, and I can attest that the overlap between the way farmers live, work and think, and celebrity culture, is exactly 0%. "
John Lanchester
Culture
Family
Live
" By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries. "
John Lanchester
Different
Lived
Old
" I grew up mainly in the Far East, where my father worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which was then a small, well-run colonial institution and not the global colossus it is today. "
John Lanchester
Hong Kong
Father
Bank
" In sport, the money goes to the talent; it goes directly to the worker - unlike a bank, which sits in the middle of transactions and whose income bears no relation to any of the services it provides. "
John Lanchester
Middle
Money
Talent
" Fires and floods, we're hardwired to accept them or at least file them under Bad Things Happening. But there's something so abstract and so modern about a bank making a technical mistake about how it funded its obligations to depositors, and suddenly you're out of work. "
John Lanchester
Bad
Work
Mistake
" I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around. "
John Lanchester
Difficulty
Remember
London
" I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth. "
John Lanchester
Birth
Believe
Very
" Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father. "
John Lanchester
Potential
Lesson
Father
" Often, in horror films, the single most effective device for building a sense of scariness is the soundtrack: the clanking of chains, the groaning of off-stage ghouls, the unmistakable sound of a cannibal rustic firing up a chainsaw. "
John Lanchester
Building
Sound
Horror
" I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it. "
John Lanchester
Reading
Practice
Envy
" Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism? "
John Lanchester
Why
Capitalism
Liberal
" Because the Spanish eat so crazily late - anybody who's been to Spain has had the experience of sitting down at 9:30 P.M. to find themselves the first customer in the restaurant - they tend to favour an early-evening drink and a nibble to keep them going. "
John Lanchester
Experience
Late
Restaurant
" At the risk of being old-fartish, I like old-school wines that taste the way the winemaker intended, as opposed to organic and untreated ones with more bottle variation. If I want to take a risk, I'll go bungee-jumping. "
John Lanchester
Go
Way
Taste
" During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany's sense of its special destiny. During the 21st century, the greatest danger to European stability is Germany's reluctance to accept its special destiny. "
John Lanchester
Accept
Special
Sense
" In my view, a review should be like talking to a friend who's just asked you, 'What was it like?' You're giving a verdict on an experience, not trying for a definitive last judgment. "
John Lanchester
Giving
Experience
You
" Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap. "
John Lanchester
Money
Cheap
You
" A preoccupation with money and, especially, with what money meant was, in our family, an inherited thing. My father's father, Jack, who died before I was born, was very much possessed by the idea that money was freedom. "
John Lanchester
Born
Family
Father
" Chefs get sucked into the trap of 'fine dining' because some guides make it central to their ratings system and because some customers have been trained to focus their expectations on the trappings and not on the food. It's all a gigantic waste of energy. "
John Lanchester
Focus
Energy
Waste
" The Chinese are much too sensible to like turkey - come to think of it, I don't think I've ever encountered turkey anywhere in East Asia, either in a market or on a menu. "
John Lanchester
Turkey
Market
Come