Put Not Thy Trust In Chariots
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Osama’s War
Wendell Steavenson
‘He, of course, had nothing to be frightened of; if he died as a mujahid he was going to a paradise heaven.’
Ecstasy
J. Robert Lennon
‘She lay there, her hand on her jeans in the place where she’d seen John’s head coming out of his mother.’
The Tailor of Gujarat
Amit Chaudhuri
‘He was desperate for the photograph to cease to exist: as if the man in the photo and he are competing for the same oxygen.’
When I Last Saw Him
Blake Morrison
‘When young, we were impatient with our parents: now we want to atone for our callowness, to take measure of them, to understand which parts of them live on in us.’
Pilgrim
Patricia Hampl
‘Real travel wants to be dangerous, wants to smoke out the truth of the Other—providing of course you get out alive.’
Making an Elephant
Graham Swift
‘The death of a father is, in most cases, an inevitable passage of life.’
The French Lieutenant’s Diary
John Fowles
‘It was really just one visual idea: a woman standing at the end of the Cobb and staring mysteriously out to sea.’
The Best Picture He Ever Saw
Ian Jack
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
Ian Jack recalls the missing buildings of his hometown, Farnworth.
The Enemy
Tessa Hadley
‘She relished the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases.‘
Rats
Maarten ’t Hart
‘Only as I watched the little tugboat disappear towards IJmuiden, just west of Amsterdam, did I begin to have doubts about what had been proposed to me.’
The Handbag Studio
Thomas Keneally
‘In Los Angeles in late October of 1980, I was feeling the strange, malign electricity the Santa Ana winds bring to the city.’
In Lana Turner’s Bedroom
Gaby Wood
‘It was because it was night-time and raining that I decided to drive up to Lana Turner's old house in Beverly Hills.’
Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes
Jonathan Lethem
‘Writing about Cassavetes feels like vocalese: putting lyrics to passages of jazz improvisation.’
Little Durga
Shampa Banerjee
‘I groaned inwardly when anybody mentioned Pather Panchali and my small part in it.’
Stay Up Late
Jim Lewis
‘She wanted to enjoy herself, she wanted to try, but she didn't know where to begin.’
Down in Front
Colson Whitehead
‘This is the part where we find our seats. Step on toes, suck in gut, make yourself flat as a movie screen.’
Worried? Us?
Bill McKibben
‘Though we know that our culture has placed our own lives on a demonic fast-forward, we imagine that the earth must work on some other timescale.’
Midsummer in April
Maarten ’t Hart
‘A premonition of approaching calamity deepened in the course of March to an unease that drove me almost crazy.’
The Weather in Mongolia
Philip Marsden
‘In Mongolian lore, winter lasts precisely eighty-one days: nine periods of nine days’.
Rowing to Alaska
Wayne McLennan
‘I can't remember whose idea it was, whose heart first beat faster, who made the other excited, but at some point Doug and I decided to row a boat to Alaska.’
The Greenland Pump
Matthew Hart
‘In its currents the ocean is printing news about our future, and we must keep up on the latest bulletins.’
The Evidence of Man
Edward Burtynsky & Noah Richler
‘When I’m photographing something in the industrial landscape, I’m looking at whatever is that residual thing.’
Captain Scott’s Biscuit
Thomas Keneally
‘So the Ross Sea Novotel and McMurdo Sheraton could be built within this century. Children will gambol on the ice shelf where Scott exhaled his last, pained breath.’
Bone Litter
Marian Botsford Fraser
‘There is a tiny skull on a pillow of bright green moss, and arm and leg bones neatly crossed, as if they had just been gently placed there in mourning.’
Do Fish Feel Pain?
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘There will always be an unbridgeable conceptual gap between our unique species and the rest.’
Hot News
Mark Lynas
‘Very little of Tuvalu is much more than twenty inches above the Pacific and its coral bedrock is so porous that no amount of coastal protection can save it.’ Brief bulletins from the frontiers of climate change: Alaska, Australia, China, Tuvalu, the United States and Peru.
The First Punch
Jon McGregor
‘I’m on the ground, and he is standing over me. Everything is muffled. I’m aware of the sound of running water somewhere.’
Loot
Christopher de Bellaigue
‘As I observed the foreigners at the museum, who turned out mostly to be archaeologists, two American soldiers crossed towards the group.’
