Leading Men
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Skinned Alive
Edmund White
‘Once in a very great while he referred to me playfully as his ‘husband’, despite his revulsion against camp.’
Letters to My Father, Now Dead
Teresa Pàmies
‘I was glad to see General Pavel at your funeral, Father.’
Summers in Norfolk
Roger Garfitt
‘I watch her arms as she moves about the room, almost in love with their colour.’
Deficits
Michael Ignatieff
‘Memory is what reconciles us to the future. Because she has no past, her future rushes towards her, a bat's wing brushing against her face in the dark.’
A History
William Cooper
‘She was fighting for breath, fighting to live, perhaps fighting not to leave us.’
Old Man Potchikoo
Louise Erdrich
‘But Potchikoo claims that his father is the sun in heaven that shines down on us all.’
Christmas Eve in Uganda
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘In fact, from the moment I spotted Amin, I made a point of neither accelerating nor slowing down – no turning or stopping.’
Polisario
Jeremy Harding
‘The wall began to look impressive, but its lethargy, the lack of activity anywhere along it, was exasperating.’
The Road to Abyei
John Ryle
‘Bor is a long way from Khartoum – more than 700 miles. There were other hostile groups on the way and precious little food.’
The Bey
Bruce Chatwin
‘“Ha!” said the old gentleman. “I see you have The Eye. I too have The Eye. We shall be friends.”’
Konstantin Melnikov: Architect
Bruce Chatwin
‘The death-knell of visionary architecture in Russia had already been sounded when Lenin's commissioner for enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, announced, “The people also have a right to colonnades.”’
The Old Silk Route
Colin Thubron
‘If I had charted the most landlocked spot on earth, the arms of my compass would have intersected here, in China's far northwest.’
Siam
Norman Lewis
‘Little surprise was aroused when the model chosen for the new Hat Yai was Dodge City of the 1860s as revealed by the movies.’
Taiwan
Ian Buruma
‘It is extremely expensive and almost entirely symbolic, for the struggle itself is symbolic, waged mostly by the Political Warfare Department.’
Saigon Dreaming
Tela Zasloff
‘In the summer of 1964, when we arrived in Saigon, our house belonged to the United States military, whose cheerful Vietnamese employees moved us in.’
More Fat Girls in Des Moines
Bill Bryson
‘I didn't really expect my grandparents to be waiting for me at the gate, on account of them both having been dead for many years.’
The Extravagance of the Italians
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘There are no Italians in Italy, only natives and newcomers.’ Hans Magnus Enzensberger on the small-change crisis in 1970s Italy. Translated by Martin Chalmers.
Warsaw Notebook
Timothy Garton Ash
‘Underground groups are called ‘structures’. Some people offer friends the service of their ‘structures’. This makes them important. Then it turns out the structures don't exist.’
Murderer in the Family (Part Two)
Rian Malan
‘It's not just their skins that are white; their minds are white, too. They are generic whites with western values.’
Moscow
Patrick Cockburn
‘Despite all the secrecy, what was happening in the Soviet Union was obvious enough: the old order, the wartime generation, was dying.’
Gibraltar
Ian Jack
‘Everyone had theories which to a greater or lesser extent conflicted with the story in court.’
Ian Jack on the inquest into the SAS killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar.
The Murderee
Martin Amis
‘This is a true story, but I can’t believe it’s really happening. It’s a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.’
Drinking Men
Todd McEwen
‘Consider a long and famous river; it teems with salmon and story, winds majestic through the most various of Scotland's shires.’
Friendship
Raymond Carver
‘But when I look again at this picture that was taken three years ago in London, after a fiction reading, my heart moves, and I'm nearly fooled into thinking that friendship is a permanent thing.’
What the Doctor Said
Raymond Carver
‘He said are you a religious man do you kneel down / in forest groves and let yourself ask for help.’
Raymond Carver, 1938 to 1988
Tess Gallagher
‘We were married in Reno, Nevada. It was a very Carveresque affair, held in the little Heart of Reno Chapel across from the courthouse. Afterwards we went gambling at Harrah's Club and with every turn of the wheel I won. I couldn't stop winning.’
