You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to Andrew

Hagen, the LRB's editor at large, who has a piece in the current issue of the paper on what he calls the desire for lost things or the desire we once had for those things.

It's a review of extinct, a compendium of obsolete objects, edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian 40, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley.

Hello, Andrew, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hi, Tom. So you begin with all these objects from the distant past or your childhood and my childhoods

soda streams and sandwichedasters and walkmans and digital watches, lava lamps, cassio calculators,

BBC microcomputers. And thinking about those sort of things, it brings back all sorts of feelings and memories

and even smells from childhood, including the time that my friend Richard got a glass

bottle stuck in his soda stream, so fully pressurised, pumping, and he finally flicked it open

and it fired across the kitchen and shattered into a thousand pieces on the other side.

People think they know the meaning of true trauma, but you've just described it for me.

The exploding soda stream.

The object that you believed in so much, you thought it would transform your entire life.

It turns out to sort of cause trouble for you, to deny you, my disaster.

How easy was it to conjure that list of stuff?

Well, the book, of course, is very helpful in the usual LRB way the book can provide such

an occasion for the flying open of floodgates.

The arrival of all these objects back into the front of my mind wasn't a difficult journey from back of mind to front because they're never

really gone those objects. They sort of sit there, partly because if you were a child in the

1970s, a teenager in the 1980s, then futurity or a picture of the future was kind of belted at you every day from 55 different directions.

We lived in a very kind of futuristic conscious society. Britain was obsessed with the idea of slimline objects and

faster trains and amazing planes with pointy beaks that went to New York in three and a half

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