What Sheba Did Wrong
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The Business
Jay McInerney
‘So I said to Dalton, “No, no, I meant–what's the secret of a great screenplay?” And he said, “It's very simple, Lex. Three acts–first act, get man up tree, second act, shake a stick at him, third act, get him down from the tree.”’
Meeting Gorbachev
Václav Havel
‘By now the Glasnost Tsar has reached the spot where I am standing. He is rather short and stocky, a cuddly ball-like figure hemmed in by his gigantic bodyguards, giving the impression of someone shy and helpless.’
Cyclone
Jonathan Raban
‘It began as a vacuum in the atmosphere, far out over the Atlantic. Trying to fill itself, it set up a spinning mass of air, like a plughole sucking water from a bath; but the faster the winds blew, the more the vacuum deepened.’
Fat Girls in Des Moines
Bill Bryson
‘When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a Mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.’
The Retreat from Galilee
Anton Shammas
‘Our village is built on the ruins of the Crusader castle of Fassove, which was built on the ruins of Mifshata, the Jewish village that had been settled after the destruction of the Second Temple by a group of deviant priests, and which the villagers, as a sort of Jewish-Crusader compromise, called Fassu-ta.’
A Guide to the City of Beirut
Fawwaz Traboulsi
‘In Beirut, a well reveals layer upon layer, generation after generation, of ruins.’
The Thirties
Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn on Paris in the thirties, cadging bed and breakfast off H.G. Wells and living in the White House with the Roosevelts.
Essex
Norman Lewis
‘Essex is the ugliest county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and get away from the settlers from London south of the river.’
Feet
Seamus Deane
‘That was my first death. When the priest tossed the first three shovelfuls of clay on to the coffin, the clattering sound seemed to ring all over the hillside graveyard and my father's face moved sideways as if he had been struck.’
Orion
Jeanette Winterson
‘Every 200,000 years or so, the individual stars within each constellation shift position. That is, they are shifting all the time, but more subtly than any tracker dog of ours can follow. One day, if the earth has not voluntarily opted out of the solar system, we will wake up to a new heaven whose dome will again confound us.’
Among Chickens
Jonathan Miller
‘The joke makes us aware that we have complex notions about those things for which we can be praised and blamed, those things which could be said to be voluntary or involuntary, those things which we can do half-heartedly, those things which we do flat out and those things we can't help.’
In Pursuit of Guzmán
Nicholas Shakespeare
‘They called him Presidente Gonzalo, but his name was Abimael Guzmán. I had come to Lima to find Guzmán, although I knew I wouldn't succeed.’
J. D. Salinger versus Random House, Inc.
Ian Hamilton
‘In New York, Salinger was required to formalize his accusations. In his affidavit, he described himself as an “author of some renown” who had “elected, for personal reasons, to leave the public spotlight entirely”.’
The Miracle at Ballinspittle
T. Coraghessan Boyle
‘This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finbarr Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch.’
A Cock Fight
Charles Nicholl
‘And now, the night before the fight, with the moon high and nearing the full, came the final preparation: we were taking him to Auguste.’
Crash
Peregrine Hodson
‘The thought of selling the shares seems disrespectful, like burning the letters of the dead. However, the market has been softening over the last two months and people are beginning to say that the bull market is over.’
Cricket in Samoa
Gavin Young
‘Balls flew towards the beach or into dense jungle. Enthusiastic young fielders tumbled head over heels in the morning glories. Village elders, large, heavy-breasted, critical men, lay in the shade on cushions discussing the course of play like contented sea lions on their favourite rocks.’
Events in the Skies
Doris Lessing
‘He told me that when he remembered his childhood that aeroplane was in the sky.’
With Your Tongue Down My Throat
Hanif Kureishi
‘“Your father had a wife in India,” Ma says, wincing every time she says father.’
Film Diary
Hanif Kureishi
‘I shove the script of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid through Stephen Frears's letter box and run. He rings a few hours later: “This isn't an innocent act!”’
An Escape from Kampala
Wycliffe Kato
‘‘Be brave,’ she said, ‘pull yourself together. What you are about to see is worse than you ever imagined.’ She asked if I knew what Winston Churchill had called Uganda. He had called it the pearl of Africa.’
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.’
