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Resistance
Richard Sennett
‘For musicians, the sense of touch defines our physical experience of art’
Frank’s Place
Richard Williams
‘Marilyn Monroe spent a couple of nights at the Cal-Neva. Sinatra knew she was in a bad way.’
Baht ’At
Blake Morrison
‘I'd already begun to suspect that sex brought misery or death, and now I knew.’
Klever Kaff
Ian Jack
‘She was an extraordinary person, and an ordinary one.’
Ian Jack on the life of Kathleen Ferrier, the English contralto singer.
The Silence
Julian Barnes
‘Naturally the artist is misunderstood. That is normal, and after a while becomes familiar.’
Translating Caetano
John Ryle
‘The beat of the city was shot through with drumming patterns used to invoke them in the Saturday night ceremonies.’
La Mer
Nicholson Baker
‘I heard Debussy's side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests’
Clara
Janice Galloway
‘She shifts, half in shadow. Whatever else, she's certainly a child. No one is with her.’
The First Sense
Robyn Davidson
‘Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb.’
Mozart, Not
Alan Rusbridger
‘It has been said that playing a Fazioli is like driving a Ferrari after driving an Austin Maestro.’
White Lies
Amit Chaudhuri
‘The guru looked discomfited, as if he’d been caught doing something inappropriate. At the same time, he looked somewhat triumphant.’
American Folk
Greil Marcus
‘Smith placed murder ballads, explosions of religious ecstasy, moral warnings and hedonistic revels on the same plane of value and meaning’
Actus Tragicus
Sir John Eliot Gardiner
‘Bach devises an ingenious symmetrical structure to underpin in music the theological division between Law and Gospel. ’
Tantum Ergo
Craig Brown
‘If you were twenty in the summer of 1967, San Francisco was the only place to be.’
Cecilia
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Now that everyone lives as if in a movie, we begin to forget that once it was only special people who did.’
Medtner
Philip Pullman
‘It feels like being a child in a room where adults are having a deep and passionate conversation about important things’
I’m Like a Bird
Nick Hornby
‘Maybe disposability is a sign of pop music's maturity, a recognition of its own limitations, rather than the converse.’
Unfinished Sympathy
Julie Burchill
‘Pop songs have the power to make me behave badly, and for the first time in my life I want to do the right thing’
Dunkirk
Ian McEwan
‘There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterwards would not let him go.’
Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater
Anonymous
‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and there is much being wasted when one deliberately chooses not to explore the ecstasy of its deeper horizons.’
Yangdol’s Journey
Manuel Bauer
‘Every year, more than 2,000 Tibetan refugees arrive in Nepal and India seeking asylum. Almost fifty per cent of them are children.’
Under the Surface
Andrew Brown
‘What I needed was to gaze into the surface, and, by gazing, to pass into another world, and breathe.’
The 12.10 To Leeds
Ian Jack
‘Outside wars and nuclear accidents, it is hard to think of any technological failure which has had such lasting and widespread effects.’
Ian Jack on the Hatfield train crash, from Granta 73.
Thailand
Haruki Murakami
‘Everything had gone well for her until her father died of cancer. Everything—without exception.’
A short story by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.
Burying The Emperor
John Ryle
‘Twenty-five years after his death, His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Elect of God, Defender of the Faith,was finally being laid to rest, though they still could not be certain how he met his end.’
John Ryle attends the funeral of Haile Sellasie.
The Andes of Martin Chambí
Martin Chambí & Amanda Hopkinson
‘Chambi's mission was to portray the dignity and traditions of his people through their lives and labours, and he was well aware of the significance of his undertaking.’
Lovely Girls, Very Cheap
Decca Aitkenhead
‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.
This Side of the Oder
Judith Hermann
‘Time retreated, his dread crouched in the farthest recess of his mind.’
I Heard It Through The Grapevine
James Campbell
At the turn of 1962–3, James Baldwin was regarded as a writer with the power...
Tehran Spring
Christopher de Bellaigue
Christophe de Bellaigue on what happened when free speech came to the ayatollahs' Tehran.
Let There Be Light!
David Feuer
‘Probably, the Rabbi would have preferred to find a Hasidic psychiatrist, but unfortunately there was no such thing.’
The Women’s Ashram
Dayanita Singh & Sunil Khilnani
‘Nirmala Chakravarty, a young and beautiful Shakta mystic from East Bengal, known to her followers as Anandamayi, first came to the city of Benares in 1928’.
