Early One Morning
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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.’
The Temple in Budapest
Nicola Pressburger & Giorgio Pressburger
‘Like the exterminating angel the rabbi appeared among us.’
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.’
