Notes for a Young Gentleman
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Zulu Romeo Foxtrot
Douglas Coupland
‘This inflexibility makes sense to a non-visual thinker, but to visual thinkers such dogma is depressing and sad, like forcing ballerinas to wear suits of armour.‘
Letter From Pondicherry, India
Akash Kapur
‘When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach.‘
Subject+Object
You can taste the clay
Hilary Mantel
‘It is slate, heavier than it looks: dull brown in colour, a little longer and wider than the palm of my hand.‘
The Paris Intifada
Andrew Hussey
‘In the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire wrote of Paris being haunted by its past, by ‘ghosts in daylight.’
Blitzed Beijing
Robert Macfarlane
‘It’s at night that you really notice the dust, because artificial light suddenly makes the fines visible.’
The Judgement of Lut
Tim Lott
‘The point is, in the tower, on that night, certain gods revealed themselves to one another and came into conflict.‘
More Afraid of You
Joshua Ferris
‘On Bainbridge Island, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, there are two modes of living: downtown and inland.’
Bomb Gone
Owen Sheers
‘We had been driving along the Bay of Wrecks on the eastern coast of Christmas Island for over an hour and a half when we saw the flock of terns.’
Mordros: The Sound of the Sea
Kurt Jackson
Kurt Jackson is an environmentalist, ecologist and one of Britain’s leading artists.
Peter Hobbs | Interview
Peter Hobbs & Roy Robins
‘Illness is solitary, because suffering is something you always do alone.’
The East Anglians
Justin Partyka
For nearly a decade, Justin Partyka has been photographing rural lives in East Anglia.
Ghost Species | Video
Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane discusses his piece ‘Ghost Species’, published in Granta 102, and reflects on the future of nature writing.
Netherley
Paul Farley
For Granta 102, Paul Farley and Niall Griffiths returned to Netherley, on Liverpool’s north-eastern rim and the fringes of rural Lancashire, and to what remains of the housing estate where they grew up.
Jonathan Raban | Interview
Jonathan Raban & Helen Gordon
‘The term ‘man of letters’ now seems hopelessly archaic, but I’d like to think there’s still life left in the notion of the writer who’s just a writer.’
Evan James Roskos | Interview
Evan James Roskos & Roy Robins
‘There is a view of American men presented by the media – of men as boorish, insensitive, emotionally immature – that manages to underscore various stereotypes that I feel fiction and poetry have a duty to dismantle.’
Preparing for war in Iraq
Seamus Murphy
‘Playing the game instantly bestows honour upon the players, with the possibility of new recruits for the American forces in Iraq.’
Jim Magee’s Hill
Pamela Petro
‘No one who’s seen The Hill has been able to describe it to me without visceral discomfort. Actually, no one’s been able to describe it at all.’
Encounter: The visions of Kurt Jackson
Mark Cocker
‘A thing of colour and elemental contest and of beauty.’
Subject+Object
Seamus Heaney
‘Birch is the tree of desire, ashimmer with sexual possibility even when it arrives swathed in botanical Latin.’
Pathologies
Kathleen Jamie
‘It felt surprisingly good to be part of that rough tribe of the mortal.’
The Tree of the Cross
Richard Mabey
‘Spending the first half of my life in the Chilterns, in southern England’s chalk country, I grew up with yews.’
Ghost Species
Robert Macfarlane
‘On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost.’
Phantom Pain
Lydia Peelle
‘Something’s out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City.’
Land’s End
Philip Marsden
‘Never by any chance will any wanderer from the world discover him in that illimitable wilderness.’
Conspiracy of Males | New Voices
Evan James Roskos
‘Nothing was your fault. You defended no one. By default, you defended us.’
