Midsummer in April
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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.’
Our Circle
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
‘I am afraid that my memory is confused about these events, the final events of my life, by which I mean what happened before I started to go blind.’
The Siege of Leningrad
Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky
‘Alexander Ivanovich woke at six, the hour when radio broadcasting would normally have begun, but the radio had been silent for a month now.’
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.’
