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Desert Island Discs
George Steiner
‘His requests did stretch the resources, almost all-encompassing, of the sound-archive. But that is part of the game.’
The Snap Revolution (Part One: The Snap Election)
James Fenton
‘It was the Cuba of the future. It was going the way of Iran. It was another Nicaragua, another Cambodia, another Vietnam.’
Toothpaste
Frank Snepp
‘The Vietnam war was conceived in secrecy, and one of the saddest things to me is that such secrecy has only been increased in its wake.’
The Snap Revolution (Part Two: The Narrow Road to the Solid North)
James Fenton
‘Most of his life has been spent under Marcos's rule, and his habit of thought was to doubt the story as presented in, say, the newspaper, and to try to guess the story behind the story.’
Impotence
Norman Podhoretz
‘As a result of Vietnam, the Pentagon has grown extremely gun-shy. These days it is virtually pacifist: it buys a lot of weapons, but doesn't really like the idea of using them.’
The Snap Revolution (Part Three: The Snap Revolution)
James Fenton
‘Late that night Marcos came on the television again, and whereas in the previous press conference he had maintained a gelid calm, now he was angry and almost out of control.’
Dominoes
Noam Chomsky
‘Postwar US policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is sustained by maximising suffering and oppression in Indochina.’
Aquino, Marcos and the White House
Mark Malloch Brown
‘Marcos had, in effect, trapped Washington into appearing to endorse a snap election, and the administration - both State Department and White House - was forced to redefine its position.’
The Essential Gesture: Writers and Responsilbility
Nadine Gordimer
‘Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity.’
The Accordion Player
John Berger
‘He played it as loud as he could, as though he hoped the music would remind the hay in the barn above of green grass and blue cornflowers.’
What Were You Dreaming?
Nadine Gordimer
‘And I'm careful what I say, I tell them about the blacks, how too many people spoil it for us, they robbing and killing, you can't blame white people.’
A Queer Streak Part Two: Possession
Alice Munro
‘He thinks he remembers Violet coming for supper, as she sometimes did, bringing with her a pudding which she set outside in the snow, to keep it cool.’
Fiction by Alice Munro.
A Conversation Piece
George Steiner
‘No. Listen to me. God's confidence in Abraham was not total. Let me hammer out my meaning.’
On Günter Grass
Salman Rushdie
‘Migrants – borne-across humans – are metaphorical beings in their very essence.’
The Tin Drum In Retrospect
Günter Grass
‘With the baggage of stored-up material, vague plans and precise ambitions - I wanted to write my novel and Anna was looking for more rigorous ballet training - we left Berlin early in 1956 and, penniless but undaunted, went to Paris.’
Wetness
Adam Nicolson
‘The eel is perfect, in its sheen of efficiency, its introversion, scarcely distinct from the place it makes its own, like a cancer, spread into every cell of the moors.’
A Warsaw Diary
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘In Poland we read every text as allusive; every situation described - even the most remote in time and space - is immediately applied to Poland.’
The Waste Land
Marilynne Robinson
‘On the coast of Cumbria, in the Lake District, there is a nuclear reprocessing plant called Sellafield, formerly Windscale, that daily pumps up to a million gallons of radioactive waste down a mile and a half of pipeline, into the Irish Sea. It has done this for thirty-five years.’
Reporting The Strike
Michael Crick
‘Striking miners accuse television of not showing police violence. We show any we manage to film - at Orgreave several horrific incidents of police beating pickets over the head with truncheons.’
Revelations
Peter Greig
‘Two years earlier, as the rest of the world looked on, half-amused, half-impressed by this anachronistic twitch of the imperial lion's tail, a large British naval armada sailed south to recover the Falkland Islands by force of arms.’
Writing in the Cold
Theodore Solotaroff
‘The first years on your own are a good time to let the imagination off the leash and let it sniff and paw into other fields of writing. From journal writing it's only a small Kierkegaardian leap into the personal essay.’
Jackdaw Cake
Norman Lewis
‘My grandfather, whom I saw only at weekends, filled every corner of the house with his deep, competitive voice, and a personality aromatic as cigar-smoke.’
Where he was: Memories of my Father
Raymond Carver
‘June was summer nights and days, graduations, my wedding anniversary, the birthday of one of my children. June wasn't a month your father died in.’
Funny Noises with our Mouths
Beryl Bainbridge
‘If we went out to tea in Southport and my mother left a tip under the plate, my grandmother used to pick it up and slide it into her handbag.’
August in my Father’s House
Michael Ignatieff
‘Dinner has been cleared away from the table under the mulberry tree, and she is sitting at the table with a wine glass in her hand watching the light dwindling away behind the purple leaves of the Japanese maple.’
Impertinent Daughters
Doris Lessing
‘She loved examinations, came first in class, adored mathematics, and was expected for a time to become a professional pianist.’
Doris Lessing on class structures and her Victorian mother.
Family Politics
Vladimir Rybakov
‘To this day, I do not know where my mother and father are buried.’
Punishable Innocence
Breyten Breytenbach
‘Here I live now in an old house next to a mourning autumn tree. How I got here I shall never be able to explain.’
Paramilitarism in Costa del Burger
Todd McEwen
‘So I got on my bicycle. Bicycle of Pain. I pedalled slowly agonizingly slowly away from the house.’
Eddie-baby
Eddie Limonov
‘Usually taciturn and self-absorbed, on that day Eddie bombarded the teachers with witticisms and cheeky, caustic remarks, for which the French mistress, shaken, sent him out of the classroom.’
