Man and Boy
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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.’
Fort-de-France
David Macey
‘In an hour or so, the bats will fly during a brief twilight. And then the tree frogs will begin to chirp in the dark ’
The Rat
Patrick Chamoiseau
‘Fort-de-France, at that time, had not yet declared war on rats. Along with the crabs, they inhabited the crumbled sidewalks and canals of the city. ’
Night in the Afternoon
Caroline Lamarche
‘A little entrance hall. A staircase. To the left of the staircase, a door with a window leading into the concierge's room.’
Lingua Franca
Luc Sante
‘In order to write of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about someone else. As a boy, I lived in French; now, I live in English.’
Whooah . . . Pizza!
Pierre Merle
The following examples of contemporary French slang come from Le Dico de l'Argot fin-de-siècle compiled by a Parisian journalist, Pierre Merle.
Agnès
René Belletto
‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.
The Farm at Le Garet
Raymond Depardon
‘On days when the light is beautiful, when the sun is red above the Saône, I find myself regretting not having come more often when my parents were working the farm.’
The Case of Stephen Lawrence
Brian Cathcart
‘Stephen Lawrence was murdered on the night of 22 April 1993, in Eltham, a south-eastern suburb of London.‘
Don’t Forsake Me
Ivan Klíma
'Bára went to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression', Ivan Klíma in 'Don't Forsake Me' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
A Note on Shakespeare
Harold Pinter
‘Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed. We tell when it ceases to beat and tell it at its highest peak of fever‘, Harold Pinter in 'A Note on Shakespeare' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
The Money Chronicles
Paul Auster
‘I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure.’
