Los Angeles

"I’m very interested in Los Angeles, my favourite city apart from London. I’ve been there many times and find it fascinating that it was the fashionable urban prototype of the late 60s. Banham’s book epitomises that and helped create the idea. It’s about the new consumerism and whether it can be accommodated within a society that is still relatively just. He’s not a Thatcherite. He may like people to buy nice things, but he doesn’t want gated communities or a tough, Murdoch-style future. Banham celebrates Los Angeles much more than Davis. But, like Peter York, this book’s appeal to me is as much to do with its style as its content. It’s freewheeling and observational about the texture of life: he jumps from very grand, famous buildings to petrol stations. I often try to do that in my own writing – to be quite intensely descriptive and dart between high and low politics regardless of the barrier. Banham is an Englishman from Norfolk. Stylistically, he’s quite posh. At the same time, when confronted with a petrol station, he can really make it come alive by writing about it without any snobbery. That was a big influence on my writing. Many people were influenced by Los Angeles. It seems absurd now, because we see it as a city of the past and an environmental disaster. But it wasn’t seen like that then. There was a tremendous British interest in America in the 70s. People think the 80s was the time we were really Americanised. But I think fashion designers, architects and other creative types looked to U.S. culture the decade before. Again, it’s the 80s in embryo. And post-modernity, too. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, to an extent I’ve used the books to underline my own argument. I haven’t chosen a conventional political book. Without being arrogant, that’s possibly because I didn’t want to write a conventional political book either – even though a lot of them are brilliantly researched. The kind of non-fiction I like is when people take an unorthodox approach to serious material. Some of these books are like that. There are signs of that. But because there isn’t that new-journalist tradition in Britain that there still is in America, people don’t know what genre you’re in if you write about history in a descriptive, past-and-present way.Too many non-fiction books, though brilliantly researched, don’t take much pleasure in the text. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers. But I’ve often tried, for example, to vary the texture so that densely researched sections contrast with more impressionistic passages. I think that’s an honest way of approaching the material. You’re writing about the past from your own era. Not mentioning that at all, ever, is missing something. Even in a lot of academic writing, where it all appears to have the same level of research, one page might have one footnote and another 20. There’s a pretence that every sentence has a source; they often don’t. I hope the reading public are getting better at spotting these more ‘hybridised’ books. I think it’s a slow process."