Gas, Boys, Gas
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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.’
A Fight in Bethnal Green
Jeremy Harding
‘There was no sizing up, no graceful footwork, none of the rhetoric of the game: this was unmitigated invective.’
Emergency Room
Eugene Richards
‘I saw cuts, burns, broken limbs, heart attacks, and then, what's inside the human body.’
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.’
