Jonathan Coe
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"Jonathan Coe" is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! (novel)/What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror What a Carve Up! (film)/film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources which was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's right wing Conservative Party (UK)/Conservative governments of the 1980s.

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I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

266

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

176

I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything I'd attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasn't up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.

155

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

151

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

151

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

132

My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.

125

As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.

57

So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in one's life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever.

49