On the 20th anniversary of Never Let Me Go, the Nobel prize-winning novelist talks about the role of the author in a post-truth world – and why he’s ‘not a great writer of prose’

• Anne Enright and others celebrate 20 years of Never Let Me Go

I arrive at Kazuo Ishiguro’s central London flat on an iron-cold, blustery and grey day, and am immediately absorbed into a scene of quiet comfort and calm; the lights are low, the furnishings white, the coffee – made by Ishiguro’s wife, Lorna, before she absents herself to go to the cinema – hot and delicious. Ishiguro, now 70 and in receipt of a Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood, has fetched the elegant cakes himself, and is immediately solicitous. Am I chilly? Am I hungry? Am I worried whether my device will record our conversation?

It’s an attentiveness to minute, even mundane detail that is evident in all his work. From The Unconsoled to The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro is the creator of some of the most unsettling and memorable fiction of the last 40 years. But perhaps no book of his is more loved than his sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, which has outsold all his others and been adapted not only into a major film but now a stage production.

The actor on his beloved Jag, being naughty at nursery school and the trouble with his hair

Born in Canada, Charles Collingwood, 81, studied at Rada. He began his career in repertory theatre and moved into children’s television. He later worked on the 90s quizshow Telly Addicts and in Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders. He is best known for playing Brian Aldridge in BBC Radio 4 drama The Archers, and this year celebrates 50 years in the role. His wife, Judy Bennett, played Shula Hebden Lloyd in The Archers. They live in Hampshire.

When were you happiest?
My childhood. I was an only child, happy and secure, and there was always plenty of time to play cricket.

Nineteen ambulances dispatched to incident, which reports indicate was a large troop transport vehicle, with some personnel ‘seriously’ injured.

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More than 35 people have been injured in a road incident involvingtwo Australian Defence Force vehicles at Lismore, in northern New South Wales.

Emergency services were called to the scene shortly after 5pm with inital reports that 22 people had been injured. This was increased to 36 people shortly after 6pm.

The director’s witty supernatural thriller joins Psycho, Hereditary, The Brutalist and more – films in which buildings are characters in their own right

The first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh, Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victorian home in an unidentified stretch of suburbia, the film never ventures outside its walls for the next 85 minutes, as the ensuing chills make us consider the merits of that purchase. Wittily and unnervingly shot from the perspective of the restless spirit roaming its halls, it’s a haunted house film in which much of the tension feels determined by the shape and flow and light and shade of the house itself. It’s a while since I’ve seen a film where I could quite so exactly draw the floor plan of its primary location, even months after viewing.

Presence is the latest entry, then, in a subset of films set in a house that gradually takes on a life and personality of its own – not just a vivid or spectacular set, but a space that begins to dictate proceedings as much as any of the human characters’ actions. Horror cinema is, of course, particularly conducive to this kind of building control – a genre where every cranny is a potential threat or refuge.