Down in Front
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Epistle to the New Age
Gore Vidal
‘I’m Bishop of Macedonia, as you will know in time if you are not lucky enough to be in time already.’
The Invasion of Panama
Martha Gellhorn
‘He turned his frantic smile and his sorrowful eyes to me, making sure I understood. “Nothing like this ever happened in Panama. Never.”’
New World (Part Four)
Jonathan Raban
‘Sleep has disassembled the self: it will take patience to rebuild a person out of the heap of components in the bed.’
In Romania
William McPherson
‘The images of the Romanian revolution – I had seen it on television in Berlin – were still vivid in my mind.’
Children’s Section, Gradinari House
Isabel Ellsen
‘Gradinari House is thirty kilometres from Bucharest. One hundred and fifteen children live here.’
Dry Run
Victoria Tokareva
‘My address book is overpopulated, like a communal apartment during the post-war housing shortage.’
Europe in Ruins
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘At the end of the Second World War Europe was a pile of ruins, not merely in a physical sense; it seemed totally bankrupt in political and moral terms.’
Hans Magnus Enzensberger on Europe after the Second World War.
What Remains
Christa Wolf
‘The coffee has to be strong and hot, filtered; the egg not too soft; home-made preserves; black bread.’
Bolivia, 1990
Ferdinando Scianna
‘Photographing these people I came to realize that their lives are dominated by fear: fear of old galleries falling, of dynamite, of the spirits trapped in the mine, of tuberculosis, of the disappearance of veta (the wolfram seam), of the future.’
Gift for a Sweetheart
Isabel Allende
‘Horacio Fortunato was forty-six when the languid Jewish woman who was to change his roguish ways and deflate his fanfaronade entered his life.’
Summers with Juliet
Bill Roorbach
‘At eight I was interested in fishing, reading and the diligent scavengering of fabulous pieces of glass and metal and, sometimes, wood.’
A House in the Country
Romesh Gunesekera
‘The nights had always been noisy: frogs, drums, bottles, dogs barking at the moon.’
Time’s Arrow
Martin Amis
‘I came rushing upward out of the blackest sleep to find myself surrounded by doctors.’
The General
Isabel Hilton
‘The kitchen telephone would ring and it would be Gustavo Stroessner, the General's son, bellowing in that strange accent down a fuzzy line from Brazil, like an unruly fictional character nagging for a larger part in the plot.’
The Future of Colombia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘With the hindsight of six years, it is clear that Colombia missed the opportunity to spare itself many of the horrors now afflicting it.’
Is Nothing Sacred?
Salman Rushdie
‘I grew up kissing books and bread.’
Salman Rushdie defends the act of writing novels.
Salman Rushdie | Interview
Salman Rushdie & Blake Morrison
Blake Morrison interviews Salman Rushdie in 1990, one year after he was placed under fatwa.
Crusoe
Salman Rushdie
‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’
On the Road to Timișoara
Christopher Hitchens
‘“Have you heard?“ said Ferenc, “Ceaușescu has been assassinated.”’
Bucharest, 26 December 1989
Léonard Freed
Léonard Freed's photographs of Bucharest on 26 December 1989, in Granta 31: The General.
North of North
Bill Bryson
‘I had also long harboured a curious, half-formed urge to see what life was like in such a remote and cheerless place.’
Isis in Darkness
Margaret Atwood
‘The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.’
Electric City
Richard Ford
‘No one, I think, thought Great Falls would burn.’
Fiction by Richard Ford.
New World (Part Three)
Jonathan Raban
‘To my eyes, airplane always looked impertinently casual on the page; it robbed the amazing machine of its proper mystery.’
On a Boat to Tangier
Tahar Ben Jelloun
‘He inspected the chest where the snakes slept. There was the viper, quiet, in a deep sleep.’
Looking for Jiří Wolf
Graham Swift
‘The fact remains that when I did ask questions, I got the same response: genuine, not stimulated, ignorance. No one seemed to have heard of him.’
The Borderlands
Neal Ascherson
‘Here is the forest. Not just a forest, but a puszcza: a Polish word that means a world of trees which have never been felled since the first bands of human beings arrived to hunt here.’
Turia
Michael Ignatieff
‘Turia’s room is at the end of an aquamarine-tiled corridor in a mansion in Holland Park, built for a department-store millionaire before the First War and now used as a halfway house for mental patients.’
The Death of Merab Kostava
Patrick Zachmann
Patrick Zachmann’s photographs from Tbilisi, Georgia, in Granta 30: New Europe!
Centre of Gravity
Victoria Tokareva
‘For reasons I don’t want to go into, I decided to commit suicide.’
