The Beijing National Stadium (The Bird’s Nest)


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‘It’s at night that you really notice the dust, because artificial light suddenly makes the fines visible.’
The Beijing National Stadium (The Bird’s Nest)
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Robert Macfarlane was born in Nottinghamshire in 1976. He is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award and the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Non-fiction Award. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.
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‘Travelling into the Ness for the first time was exactly like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker’
Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Adam Scovell.
‘This is the Broomway, allegedly ‘the deadliest’ path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked.’
‘On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost.’
‘The best writers rose to the challenge by seeking not originality of destination, but originality of form.’
‘Entering a wood is to enter an element as different as the sea.’
Best of Young British Novelist Jenni Fagan selects five songs that she loves to write to.
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