Wheels of Progress
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The Trial
Gordon Burn & Tom Pilston
‘There are constants in the media landscape, the images that, even half-seen, alert us to another excitingly dire occurrence.’
Taken Out of Context
Paul Beatty
‘I’d never been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before.’
The Lawyer’s Story
Paul Theroux
‘Bow tie, blue shirt, tight suit, cowboy boots—he was overdressed for Singapore.’
The Butcher of Bermondsey
Graham Swift
‘Then he led me out into the noise and the glare and the stink.’
Meat Country
J.M. Coetzee
‘It is eccentric not to eat meat in the United States, doubly so in Texas.’
People Eaters
Joan Smith
‘In 1777, a butcher's assistant from Cheshire, Samuel Thorley, was tried for murder at Chester Assizes.’
Aphrodisiacs I Have Known
Norman Lewis
‘In the winter of 1957, I went to Liberia for the New Yorker.’
The Sins of the Flesh
Margaret Visser
‘The message that vegetarianism imparts to the rest of us is ascetic and exclusive.’
A Mystery
Charles Jones
‘Charles Jones took beautiful photographs of vegetables, fruit and flowers.’
Do Women Like to Cook?
Laura Shapiro
‘Until recently, the question 'Do women like to cook?' wouldn't have been asked and couldn't have been answered.’
What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat
Chitrita Banerji
‘Spring in Bengal is teasing and elusive, secret yet palpable, waiting to be discovered.’
Frozen Fish
William Leith
‘I remembered the freezer from when we were kids. It had been important to us then, the site of many shameful boyish deeds.’
Toffee
Agnes Owens
‘"Bloody well wake up!" Maureen's mother called to her -daughter, who slept in the kitchen bed recess.’
Stringhoppers
Romesh Gunesekera
‘In 1956, my father was thirty-nine years old. He didn't even know how to boil an egg.’
First Catch Your Puffin
Sean French
‘A man is rescued after years stranded on a desert island with two companions, one of whom died.’
Men as Chickens
Geoffrey Beattie
‘She had offered four men £2,500 each to live like battery hens for a week.’
Nobody Need Starve
Amartya Sen
‘Famines can occur with or without substantial declines in food output.’
The Gourmet
John Lanchester
‘I have vivid memories of my one or two visits to my brother during his incarceration in various gulags.’
How It Ends
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Seagulls murmur overhead, and nip at the banks. You can hear almost nothing.’
Our Mother’s New Man
Andrea Ashworth
‘To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.’
Hitler and the Billygoat
John Sweeney
‘The court martial was held in secret, because it concerned the security of the state.’
Plato Speaks
Caroline Alexander
‘Photographs showed a wood-panelled room, furnished with a long table spread with a leopard skin.’
Bicycle Thieves
Blake Morrison
‘Late June, scorched grass and sprinklers, the sky as if scuffed and beaten. Too hot to work, too lazy to think.’
LA Women
Douglas Brooker
‘I was bored. That was how it started. Anything I ever did that amounted to anything–or not–has always been the result of being sick of doing something else.’
Trouble at the Waterworks
Edward Blishen
‘Old age is a sustained process of injury. You are being very distinctly shot at.’
The Professor’s History
Claire Messud
‘The call of the muezzin reached his ears only as a muffled wail, the keeper of ritual and the passage of time.’
The Lady with the Laptop
Clive Sinclair
‘It is Friday, and I am at the airport waving a little flag, a one-man welcoming committee.’
The Boat People
Philip Gourevitch
‘My grandmother lived in America for forty years before her death, yet she never stopped referring to herself as a refugee.’
