On Writing Roman à Clef and Using Real Models

Julian Barnes’s latest novel Elizabeth Finch, his first since The Only Story in 2018, is very much a novel of ideas. As a student sorts through the notebooks of his former teacher, the inspirational Elizabeth Finch, her ideas unlock for him the philosophies of the past and illuminate the present, underpinned by the story and ideas of Julian the Apostate, the late Roman Emperor who abandoned Christianity in favour of a neo-Platonic Paganism. Barnes was in conversation with Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man (Faber).

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