Dinner with Dr Azad
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Democracy
Joseph Brodsky
‘Nothing, really, Petrovich. That Georgian, you know, that foreign minister of theirs, says that half an hour ago, Himself announced at a press conference that democracy is being introduced here.’
New World (Part Two)
Jonathan Raban
‘It was how Europeans had always seen American nature – as shockingly bigger, more colourful, more deadly, more exotic, than anything they’d seen at home.’
New World (Part One)
Jonathan Raban
‘At first sight the ship was bigger than the dock in which it floated, a whale sprawled in a hip-bath‘.
Msinga
Rian Malan
‘Some ten miles beyond the last white town, you cross the border between the First and Third Worlds, between white South Africa and black kwaZulu.‘
Walled City of Hong Kong
Patrick Zachmann
‘I first went to Kowloon’s Walled City in 1987 with a Chinese friend. I returned there alone in the summer of last year.’
A Childhood in Broadmoor Hospital
Patrick McGrath
‘These were the friends of my early boyhood, men who twenty years earlier would still have been called ‘criminal lunatics’.‘
First Train Journey
Paul Theroux
‘I had been travelling for more than ten years – in Europe, Asia and Africa – and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book.‘
Feminine Mystique
Josef Škvorecký
‘I don't think that’s such a hot idea. Resistance isn't for girls.’
Beirut Diary
Robert Fisk
‘The nun beside me on the helicopter this morning had a tight, self-righteous face.’
Bogotá, Colombia
Roger Garfitt
‘Driving along la Séptima, the main road into the centre of Bogotá, we find ourselves blocked by a high-speed convoy.’
Tiananmen Square
John Simpson
‘I had seen people die in front of me before. But I had never seen three people die, one after the other, in this way.’
6 March 1989
Salman Rushdie
‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.
The Ultimate Safari
Nadine Gordimer
‘We were in the war, too, but we were children, we were like our grandmother and grandfather, we didn’t have guns.’
The Structure of Things Here
David Goldblatt
‘In our structures we South Africans tend to declare ourselves quite nakedly, sometimes eloquently, and rarely with dissimulation.’
A Discourse on the Elephant
Richard Rayner
‘This is not the story of my life, at least not the story of all of it, but it is the story of my father.’
Noël, Noël
George Steiner
‘Come Christmas, sounds mix and multiply. And are shot through with smells.’
Furniture of Desire
Walter Abish
‘It took him only a moment to eliminate all doubt. The opportunity was ripe.’
Transfigured Night
William Boyd
‘My sisters, I am sure, were immune to suicide’s powerful contagion.’
The Man with the Dagger
Russell Hoban
‘I thought the story would be the most likely place to look for Dahlmann, so I went there.’
Pilgrims in Ireland
Markéta Luskačová
‘The bareness of this land was beyond anything I had imagined, but in the faces of these men, in their postures, their prayers, there was something that felt very familiar to me.’
Americans
Eugene Richards
From hospitals for the criminally insane to elderly sisters with brain disorders, Eugene Richard's portraits are a haunting and intimate look inside America.
Journal
Leonard Michaels
‘Of course I wouldn’t. It would be politically incorrect, as is anything really personal.’
The Lens Factory
John Updike
‘It made him feel lopsided, this sense of being plucked at by nervousness and dread.’
Thursday Night in Tokyo
Peregrine Hodson
‘The spotlight grew brighter, there was a movement behind the curtain, and a dwarf with a painted clown’s face stepped into the circle of light.’
Mouth
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘I lost my left ear from a bite. . .Through the thin slit that remains I can hear the sounds of the world.’
Mistakes
Colin Thubron
‘In twenty or thirty years’ time, perhaps, a monument will be raised to the martyrs of Tiananmen Square, innocent harbingers of a more liberal age.’
