The Silence
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America’s Secret War
Leslie Cockburn
‘Morales’s troubles began in the spring of 1984, when he was indicted for conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. It was this awkward development that made him particularly receptive to the proposal he received from a delegation of Contras and a CIA man that turned up at his Opa-locka office soon after the bad news.’
Remission
Adam Mars-Jones
‘There's an awkward interval, when you're ill but not yet conditioned by illness.’
Spoils
Nadine Gordimer
‘Everyone will be quite safe if they stay in the car and please roll up the windows, says the host.’
The Man from Hiroshima
Maurizio Chierici
‘Then the explosion stunned me momentarily. Hiroshima disappeared under a yellow cloud. No one spoke after that.’
The Discovery of Mexico
Carlos Fuentes
‘I was born on 11 November 1928, under the sign I would have chosen, Scorpio, and on a date shared with Dostoevsky, Crommelynck and Vonnegut.’
How Great Thou Art
Graham Coster
‘At the very end we came upon him – others had seen him from time to time, and reported that he was still out there – and he was bigger even than we had expected.’
Madrid
Tony Lyons
‘There was a note on the table: Phone Rafa, 983754. There were different Rafas known to me in Madrid, and at the moment I was in touch with none of them.’
A Story for Aesop
John Berger
‘The image impressed me when I set eyes upon it for the first time. It was as if it were already familiar, as if, as a child, I had already seen the same man framed in a doorway.’
Bruce Chatwin | Interview
Bruce Chatwin & Michael Ignatieff
‘We have everything here, but I always wish I was somewhere else. It's a condition that makes one very difficult to live with.’
Michael Ignatieff interviews Bruce Chatwin.
Dreamtime
Bruce Chatwin
‘In Alice Springs – a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers – I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.’
Ryszard Kapuściński | Interview
Ryszard Kapuściński & Bill Buford
‘Mine is not a vocation, it's a mission.’
Outline For A Book
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘I have come home from Africa, jumping from a tropical roasting-pit and dropping into a snow-bank.’
Stiff
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘On the flatbed lies a coffin. Atop the black box is a garland of haggard angels.’
Photographs from the North-West Frontier
Ed Grazda
Ed Grazda has been visiting the North-west Frontier Province since 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
A Battle
Patrick Süskind
‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’
Cold Storage
Oliver Sacks
‘Uncle Toby was alive, but suspended, apparently, in some strange icy stupor.’
Paradise
Jonathan Schell
‘It is characteristic of Brodsky that he attributes the substance of his thinking to another writer's lines.’
Letters from Prison
Václav Havel & Jiří Dienstbier
‘When the governor forbade Havel to write essays, ordering him to write only about himself, he started a series on his fifteen different moods.’
Finished With Engines
Ian Jack
‘My father wrote a kind of autobiography in the years before he died.’
Weightless
Primo Levi
‘What I would like to experience most of all would be to find myself freed, even if only for a moment, from the weight of my body.’ Primo Levi on floating.
Menudo
Raymond Carver
‘Vicky says I’m crazy. She said worse things too last night. But who could blame her?’
Amazon Adventure
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘Having spent two months travelling in the primary rain forests of Borneo, I thought that a four-month journey in the country between the Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon in Brazil would pose no particular problem.’
Eating the Eggs of Love
Salman Rushdie
‘Forested mesas flanked the road to Matagalpa; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon.’
A Family in Nanjing
Colin Thubron
‘The old people had prepared a banquet for me - an extravagant spread of cold meats and dumplings which we ate with the prestige television blaring, and nobody watching it.’
Under Eastern Eyes
Timothy Garton Ash
‘They sit around, feet in slippers, drinking wine and swapping jokes about Chernobyl. They have just produced the best journal of new writing in Czechoslovakia. It took about twenty minutes.’
Cuba Revisited
Martha Gellhorn
‘I drove around Havana, sightseeing, half-curious, and wholly sick of the miserable weather.’
Bradford
Hanif Kureishi
‘Bradford, I felt, was a place I had to see for myself, because it seemed that so many important issues, of race, culture, nationalism, and education, were evident in an extremely concentrated way.’
The Shaman of Chichicastenango
Norman Lewis
‘Many Guatemalans claimed to have experienced almost miraculous cures at the hands of the shamans, and the pilgrimages to Chichicastenango had begun.’
A Tour of Angola
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘You have to learn how to live with the check-points and to respect their customs, if you want to travel without hindrance and reach your destination alive.’
A Journey into Afghanistan
Peregrine Hodson
‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’
