Northanger Abbey
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The Consultant
Mark Malloch Brown
‘Let the old politicians run against you. It will restore your political independence and make you unbeatable.’
In the Andes
Sergio Larrain
Sergio Larrain’s photographs of the Andes for Granta 36: Vargas Llosa for President.
Time’s Arrow (Part Three): The Conclusion
Martin Amis
‘Your shoulder blades still jolted to the artillery of the Russians as they scurried eastward.’
Sitting on Top of the World
T. Coraghessan Boyle
‘It was like floating untethered, drifting with the clouds, like being cupped in the hands of God.’
Plastic
Graham Swift
‘Sorting out the world! He should have sorted out himself and his own jeopardized household.’
The Unbearable Peace
John le Carré
‘It is a journalistic conceit to pretend you are unmoved by people. But I am not a journalist and I am not superior to this encounter.’
Of Bankers and Soldiers
Alex Kayser
Alex Kayser’s photographs of Swiss bankers and soldiers for Granta 35: The Unbearable Peace.
Switzerland Without an Army?
Max Frisch
‘Why should Switzerland of all places have no army? It costs billions and billions, but we can afford it.’
Václav Havel in Zürich
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
‘It so happens that the Swiss are a warlike people, even though no one has attacked us for over 200 years.’
In Summer Camps
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘The sky burned white to blond to powder to an almighty blue; the sun fell unobstructed.’
Some are Born to Sweet Delight
Nadine Gordimer
‘She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’t go a step nearer.’
A Mid-life Crisis
Patrick Süskind
‘Just what exactly is it that belongs together, pray tell? Absolutely nothing!’
Death of a Harvard Man
Simon Schama
‘The lettuce sat in its brown bag, wilting in the unseasonable warmth.’
Christmas in Bavaria
Jan Bogaerts
‘Bergtesgaden was, for some time, the home town of both Adolf Hitler and Dieter Eckhardt, the father of national socialism.’
The Great Santa
Geoffrey Wolff
‘The Great Santa, like circumstance itself, blew hot and cold; He was all caprice, chance, crapshoot.’
I’m a Mad Dog Biting Myself for Sympathy
Louise Erdrich
‘I had never seen a child this little before, so small that it was not a child yet.’
Boys in Zinc
Svetlana Alexievich
‘I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself.’
War Memories
Peregrine Hodson
‘I said I thought it was difficult to judge the actions of war in peace because war and peace are different worlds.’
An Egyptian in Baghdad
Amitav Ghosh
‘It was exactly three weeks since Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and miraculously, Abu-Ali, the old shopkeeper, was on his feet.’
Time’s Arrow (Part Two)
Martin Amis
‘Nine nights later we woke up in the small hours and lay there coldly. “Shtib,” he grunted.’
In Soweto
Jeremy Harding
‘Now, in the first light of the liberation, Soweto was opaque and murderous.’
The Many Deaths of General Wolfe
Simon Schama
‘But what good had this done except to assuage the endless sense of impotence and rage that swelled inside him as spring turned into a scorching, dripping, foul-smelling summer?’
Dragons
Julian Barnes
‘Everything bad came from the north. Whatever else they believed, the whole town, both parts of it, knew that.’
The Savage Notebook
Richard Holmes
‘Richard Savage remains a shadowy figure until the moment of his arrest for murder, in a back alley near Charing Cross, in November 1727.’
Sovinec in Moravia
Jindrich Streit
‘Before the Second World War there were sixty families – most of them Sudeten Germans – and fifty-eight houses in Sovinec, a small village in Czechoslovakia north-east of Brno. Now there are only twenty-six people living in the eight remaining habitable houses.’
New York City: Crash Course
Elizabeth Hardwick
‘A spectacular warehouse this city is; folk from anywhere.’
The Paris Years of Arcadio Huang
Jonathan Spence
‘Only a handful of Chinese before him had journeyed to the West.’
