But Richard Widmark
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While Waiting for a War
Graham Greene
‘The man who believes in eternity must often experience an acute nostalgia for atheism - to indulge himself with the rest.’
‘They’: Stalin’s Polish Élite
Teresa Toranska
‘You referred to a comrade as ‘Mister’. That's offensive.’
In Search of Amin
Patrick Marnham
‘In Chicago and London the men who had never been to Amin’s Uganda already knew what they thought. An eye-witness account only served to confuse them.’
Prague: A Disappearing Poem
Milan Kundera
‘Prague, this dramatic and suffering centre of Western destiny, is gradually fading away into the mists of Eastern Europe, to which it has never really belonged.’
Forced Busing in South Africa
Joseph Lelyveld
‘In the other scene of black men in the dock, there had been fifty-six of them, wearing large numbered placards around their necks so they could be identified.’
Erotic Politicians and Mullahs
Hanif Kureishi
‘Strangely, anti-British remarks made me feel patriotic, though I only felt patriotic when I was away from England.’
A Letter to my Sons: War’s End
Heinrich Böll
‘No, it's not easier for you than it was for us: don't let them tell you otherwise.’
October, 1948
Kazuo Ishiguro
‘I remember looking around me with approval that first night, and today, for all the changes which have transformed the world around it, Mrs Kawakamu's remains as pleasing as ever.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro.
A Queer Streak Part One: Anonymous Letters
Alice Munro
‘She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgement had deserted her.’
Fiction by Alice Munro.
Herself in Love
Marianne Wiggins
‘She thought, Love is a Revelation, like a religion, some religions; like Islam.’
My Mother’s Life (Part Two)
Doris Lessing
‘‘No, you can not,’ said my mother, ‘we can't afford it.’ Prophets are never appreciated by their nearest and dearest.’
Italo Calvino
John Updike
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
Excesses
Oliver Sacks
‘Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy: hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.’
Amazon
Dorothea Lynch & Eugene Richards
‘We women, how in the dark we are about our bodies and what can happen to them. We ask in whispers in the corner at a party or on the telephone, what does a breast lump feel like? What does cancer look like? Will I be all right?’
Bell And Langley
Thomas McMahon
‘He said that new ideas only came to him between these hours, and when they did, they were like recollections of things forgotten. Sometimes he put on his hat and coat at two a. m. and walked ten miles, the way a mourner will do when he is trying to recall the sight of a beloved face.’
The Loves of The Tortoises
Italo Calvino
‘There are two tortoises on the patio: a male and a female. Zlak! Zlak! their shells strike each other. It is the season of their love-making.’
Italo Calvino on animal drive and communication.
Co-operation for the Birds
Lewis Thomas
‘Somehow, despite the internal squabbles and constant competitions, the tree swallow societies manage to get by and survive, year after year.’
The Scientists of Star Wars
William Broad
‘Until 1980 or so I didn't want to have anything to do with nuclear anything. Back in those days I thought there was something fundamentally evil about weapons. Now I see it as an interesting physics problem.’
Children of The Wind
Primo Levi
‘Today Kaenunu is largely deserted. On Mahui, on the other hand, it is not unusual for anyone with patience and good vision to catch sight of some atoula.’
Self-Control
Primo Levi
‘He'd have to keep an eye on his liver now, the way you do with cars, if you want them to last: regular washing and greasing, an eye cast over the electrics, the injectors, all the pumps, the battery and the brakes.’
Chromium
Primo Levi
‘Life is full of customs whose roots can no longer be traced ... but in any event, why were pig's feet obligatory with lentils, and cheese on macaroni?’
Adam’s Navel
Stephen Jay Gould
‘Since Omphalos is such spectactular nonsense, readers may rightly ask why I choose to discuss it at all. I do so, first of all, because its author was such a serious and fascinating man.’
Quantum Jumps
Tim O'Brien
‘Where on earth is the happy ending? Kansas is burning. All things are finite. ‘Love,’ I say feebly. The hole finds this amusing.’
The Imagination of Disaster
Mary Gordon
‘We live knowing not only that we will die, that we may suffer, but that all that we hold dear will finish; that there will be no more familiar.’
The Bridge
David Mamet
‘Surely the world was going to end. And probably in fire - in nuclear destruction, by mistake, or at the hands of madmen.’
England, Whose England?
Darryl Pinckney
‘My Anglophilia was something like haemophilia - that is, I was easily bruised by facts so stayed away from them.’
Warsaw Diary (Part Two: 1983)
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘History as class struggle? As a struggle of systems? Agreed: but history is equally the struggle between culture and the mob, between humanity and bestiality.’
Women and Power in Cuba
Germaine Greer
‘For a feminist like me who considers that the combination of dazzle with drudgery is one of the most insidious ways in which women in our society are subject to stress, the multiplication of contradictory demands upon the Cuban women is a cause for concern.’
Nicaragua: An Appeal
David Hare
‘To arrive in Nicaragua is at once to be disorientated, for since the earthquake in 1972, there has been, and is still no proper city of Managua.’
Nicaragua
Christopher Hitchens
‘Nicaragua has always impelled its writers into politics, or exile, or both.’
Editorial
Bill Buford
‘The twentieth century has tolerated a number of mythologies about the role of the writer, and one of the most commonplace is the writer as inspired genius.’
