Nothing But Ghosts
Sort by:
The Lazy River
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest or with any equatorial jungle.’
Kemp and Potter
Nicholas Shakespeare
‘By coming to Tasmania, I'd repeated the pattern of an ancient, unknown relative and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way.’
The Lost City
Isabel Hilton
‘There is nobody to blame but the Communist Party. They had absolute control during the fifty years it took to destroy Beijing, and they had the chance to develop a modern, civilized city.’
Our Lives are Only Lent to Us
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘The two cultures are complementary but in the way that death is to life.’
Overreachers
Richard Ford
‘Madeleine Granville was standing at the hotel window of the Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Mansfield Street was her yellow Saab’.
The Hotel Capital
Olga Tokarczuk
‘At the same time I take off my exotic language, my strange name, my sense of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreciated here, my memory of small events—and I stand naked in this pink and white uniform as if emerging from the sea mist.’
Pronek in History
Aleksandar Hemon
‘This happened on a night train to Linz: swarthy-faced robbers startle Adolf and strip his felt jacket halfway down his arms so he cannot move them (their long nails scratching him just above his elbow)’.
Sierra Leone
Teun Voeten
‘Sierra Leone is a small country on the coast of West Africa of roughly the same size and population as Scotland: 28,000 square miles, about five million people’.
But Richard Widmark
Nik Cohn
‘I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind’.
Whale
Panos Karnezis
‘Whale arrived at work a little after seven with black circles round his eyes’.
The Ascent of Man
Joseph O’Neill
‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’
The Trout Opera
Matt Condon
‘On the veranda of the Buckley's Crossing Hotel, reclining in dimpled leather armchairs, Judges Carrington and Thorpe observed in silence the giant trout shuffling across the bridge’
When I Was Lost
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Maybe the trick is to find your surroundings so engrossing, so diverting, as to be unaware that anyone is missing you. The chances are nobody is’.
Against Travel Writing
Robyn Davidson
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
The Emotions are not Skilled Workers
Elliot Perlman
‘He is wrong, though. You didn’t read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry but you didn’t.’
It Don’t Mean a Thing
Paul Auster
‘The single inhabitant of an asteroid that orbits around a tertiary moon of Pluto, visible only through the strongest telescope.’
Obedience
Ian Parker
‘Herbert Winer, who has not tortured anyone for nearly forty years, lives in New Haven, Connecticut, as he did in the early Sixties.’
Ian Parker on authority, ethics and human behaviour.
The Red Coral Bracelet
Judith Hermann
‘My first and only visit to a therapist cost me my red coral bracelet and my lover.’
If I Dream I Have You
Justine Picardie
The savage, it is said, fails to distinguish the visions of sleep from the realities...
Paolo
Tim Parks
‘My last glimpse of Paolo was on the platform at Verona station when I pointed him out to the police.’
Real Time
Amit Chaudhuri
‘He sighed; his wife never satisfied him when he needed her most; and quite probably it was the same story the other way round.’
In Search of the Third Way
Roy Hattersley
‘The evidence suggests that the Third Way is a reactive rather than a creative force, a response rather than an original idea.’
New New World
Peter Conrad
‘I left Australia at the age of twenty, carrying with me everything I thought I would need.’
Marrying Eddie
Robyn Davidson
‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’
True History of the Kelly Gang, First Part
Peter Carey
‘I lost my own father at 12 yrs. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences’.
The New Hieroglyphics
Les Murray
‘Rice in bowl with chopsticks / denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.’
Pobby and Dingan
Ben Rice
“I’m looking for my daughter’s imaginary friends and you’d better bloody well believe it, mate!”
The Weeping Pom
Howard Jacobson
‘I hold the view that Australia is a more sweetly civilized country than England, but I don’t want people to think I’ve gone soft in the head.’
The Road to Ginger Riley’s
Paul Toohey
‘Mike Fordham lies under a makeshift canvas shelter at the turn-off, dying.’
