The Father
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Iain Sinclair | A London View
Iain Sinclair
‘The point of a good view is that it encapsulates, and gives relief from, the journey that has led up to it.’
The Man in The Van
Lucretia Stewart
‘On Friday 20 March 1998 at ten-thirty in the morning I was lying in the bath, washing my hair’.
Julian Barnes | A London View
Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes shares a view of London from his childhood.
With a Bang
Helen Simpson
‘There had been an unbelievable amount of talk about the weather, not to mention the end of the world and so on’.
David Sylvester | A London View
David Sylvester
‘When you turn your back on the view, you're face to face with the Western Pumping Station across the street and its campanile-like tower.’
Dame Shirley
Jay Rayner
Dame Shirley Porter would not agree to talk in her flat in Israel, overlooking the...
Sohoitis
Ian Hamilton
What brings me to this place, this pass? It’s four-fifteen in the afternoon on Charlotte...
Doris Lessing | A London View
Doris Lessing
‘No one driving along it could possibly guess the truth.’
Penelope Lively | A London View
Penelope Lively
A cat walks across the empty tarmac of the yard. The place is once more local and domestic.
A Small Bengal, NW3
Amit Chaudhuri
‘Those who stayed on had their reasons. . . and none of those reasons, it is safe to suppose, had anything to do with an overwhelming attachment to England.’
An essay by Amit Chaudhuri.
The Prince and I
Ferdinand Dennis
My long and ambivalent relationship with the Albert Memorial started soon after I was brought...
Jenny Uglow | A London View
Jenny Uglow
My favourite view is just a sudden vertical glimpse. It’s the drear end of November...
Churchill’s Cigar
Ian Buruma
It was in 1960, or possibly 1961, at any rate before the first Beatles LP,...
Fishing, Writing and Ted: An Appreciation
Graham Swift
‘Sometimes it haunts you like a knell, sometimes it's the motto for unimagined privilege.’
Survivors
Angus Macqueen
‘In these circumstances man becomes like an animal: silent and bowed. You never said a word.’
Moscow Dynamo
Victor Pelevin
‘That's why they're able to live like normal human beings, he thought, because they never forget about their duty. They don't spend all their time getting pissed like folks here.’
Burying the Bones
Orlando Figes
’There are times when every nation needs to think a little less about its history.‘
The Lost Boys
Anna Pyasetskaya & Heidi Bradner
‘If a star began to fall it meant that a plane was preparing to bomb.’
The River Potudan
Andrei Platonov
‘Grass had grown back on the trodden-down dirt tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped.’
My Grandmother, the Censor
Masha Gessen
‘Where do crimes begin and end, and who, decades later, can be held responsible?’
The Last Eighteen Drops
Vitali Vitaliev
‘Drinking vodka is just a memory for me now. Vodka was hurting me.’
Peter Truth
Charlotte Hobson
‘Petya Pravda's dead. He died forty days ago, as elongated and translucent as an icon.’
The Romanovs Come to Stay
Frances Welch
‘When I was a child I seemed to live in a fog of inattention which cleared only when I was alone.’
The Coincidence of the Arts
Martin Amis
‘Round about, a thousand conversations missed a beat, gulped, and then hungrily resumed.’
Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
Destroyed
Hilary Mantel
‘What an awful death, I said to myself. Smirking, I said, what a destruction.’
A short story by Hilary Mantel.
The Boy Who Watched the Ships Go By
Orhan Pamuk
‘For the last thirty years I've been keeping track of the ships that sail through the Bosporus.’
We Are the Kings
Michel Houellebecq
‘Smoking cigarettes has become the only element of real freedom in my day-to-day existence.’
A Sentence of Love
Assia Djebar
‘I met Annie for the first time in 1995, in Algiers. A friend of my sister's, she came from Paris and stayed with me for one night.’
