Room 536
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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.’
Delinquent in Derry
Nik Cohn
‘Across the river, in a Catholic enclave in the Waterside district, there was a disused funeral home in which, three nights a week, at 6d a shot, contraband teen movies could be sat through and sometimes seen, according to the state of the projector.’
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Angela Carter
‘Silence and space and an unimaginable freedom which they dare not imagine.’
The Ivory Acrobat
Don DeLillo
‘She lay in a kind of timeless drift, a mindwork spiral, carried on half-formed thoughts. She passed into a false sleep and then was listening again. She opened her eyes.’
Means of Transport
John Berger
‘Use these photos as means of transport. Ride on them. No passes needed. Go close. Imprudently close. They leave every minute.’
John Berger on images of violent dispossession from South Africa and Lesotho.
Murderer in the Family
Rian Malan
‘'m just going to lay this all upon you and trust that you are a visionary reader, because the grand design, such as it is, is going to be very hard for you to see.’
The Albatross
Bruce Chatwin
‘On the south side of the Beagle Channel is the Chilean island of Navarino, with its naval base at Puerto Williams. I hoped to walk around the coast and get a glimpse of Hermit Island, which is the breeding colony of the black-browed Albatross.’
Inside Intelligence
Anthony Cavendish
‘Good heavens, old boy! It isn't the Russians we worry about; it's the British public that we don't want to know about it.’
Fortune
Tobias Wolff
‘We’d left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed west under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam.’
A Letter to Our Son
Peter Carey
‘We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison's face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.’
Kwangju and After
James Fenton
‘Some people said they were not ‘with’ the students. They were not in favour of the use of arms. But they were of one voice in saying that the students were their sons, and that if the army came in the students would be put to death. That was why they kept saying: “Tell the truth about us.”’
James Fenton on the Gwanju massacre.
Chiloé
Bruce Chatwin
‘The island of Chiloé is celebrated for its black storms and black soil, its thickets of fuchsia and bamboo, its Jesuit churches and the golden hands of its woodcarvers.’
Immigrant
Nik Cohn
‘In every other respect – colour, country, creed – these people might have nothing in common. Some were convicted criminals, others sought political asylum, still others had overstayed their visas or were accused of Green Card frauds, and a few might even be mistakes, the victims of computer or human error. But this one bond was absolute.’
The Apprentice
E. L. Doctorow
‘And there was no resistance, I saw a movement of black bulk, that was all, and all I heard was maybe the sound someone makes who is frightened and has a hand not his own over his mouth, the doors slammed and the car was humming and gone and the boat was already opening up water between itself and the slip before a thin minute had passed.’
