The Man in The Van
Sort by:
A Life in Photographs
Don McCullin
‘What I'm doing is not art. How can I call it that? I'm stuck with a load of pictures of humanity–suffering, dying, bleeding. These pictures come from a witness.’
A Poet in Cuba
Reinaldo Arenas
‘Perfect totalitarian systems have always been in the vanguard: they modify not only the past and the future, but they also abolish the present.’
The Business of Mourning
Christian McEwen
‘It is difficult to acknowledge that people have their own lives, their own deaths, their own integrity.’
Skating with Lenin
Jaroslav Seifert
‘In the winter of 1912 a small man in a Persian lamb-skin hat was also skating there.’
Weaning
Adam Mars-Jones
‘As he grew up he would drink, and likewise urinate, without embarrassment. Snacks, so long as they were light and informal, were liquids: casual and seemly.’
On the Orwell Trail
Bernard Crick
‘I share Orwell's view that the masses are controlled - or that people are massified - by prolefeed.’
Editorial
William Buford
‘Dr O’Brien’s column was a curious achievement. And a mystifying one. It somehow succeeded in making Granta an accomplice in its own kidnapping.’
Paris or Prague?
Milan Kundera
‘May in Paris was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary scepticism.’
Miracles
Josef Škvorecký
‘It was already dusk, a conspicuously symbolic black cloud was rising in the east, lit from the opposite direction by the orange and gold rays of the sun wreathed in a Technicolor sunset.’
Cambodia and Someth May
James Fenton
‘When I first saw the draft of the piece which follows, I realized that the book he was writing had reached an essential stage of articulacy.’
The Field Behind the Village
Someth May
‘As I lay down and closed my eyes, the body of Comrade Chhith reappeared before me with a horrible vividness. I realized that he had been beaten to death.’
A Question of Geography
John Berger & Nella Bielski
‘If I'm not transferred to the mines, I'll hold out, and you must go on thinking of me as dead: you will be closer, my heart, to the reality.’
Coming down from the Mountains
Reinaldo Arenas
‘There is nothing to be heard now; just, in the darkness, the racket of the victrolas in Loma Colorada barrio, and the organ lording it over all the other noises.’
China’s Other Revolution
Orville Schell
‘Hurrying back to the rally ground, I could already hear the sound of martial music drifting out across Taicheng. As I approached the gates of the field, the music suddenly stopped and a strident voice began blasting out over a loudspeaker.’
Reflections on Exile
Edward W. Said
‘Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people.’
Under Another Name
Doris Lessing
‘No, Jane Somers is not my mother, but thoughts of women like my mother fed Jane Somers.’
Jane Somers’s Diaries
Doris Lessing
‘I had never thought that before, never felt life in that way, as I did then; washing Maudie Fowler, a fierce angry old woman.’
A Wedding
Anita Brookner
‘The bride and groom were there all the time, in the centre, as they should be. A good-looking couple. But lifeless, figures from stock.’
The Time Sickness
Martin Amis
‘Before me through the restraining bars, the sunset sprawls in its polluted pomp, full of genies, cloaked ghosts, crimson demons of the middle sky.’
A Conversation with the Head of Orpheus
Russell Hoban
‘Far, far away in the night are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak, and they're looking at their illuminated dials as I look at mine at this end of the darkness that curves with the night miles to the heave and swell of the ocean dawn.’
Notes from East Germany
Timothy Garton Ash
‘Like previous re-settlers, the East Germans now living in the West produced works in what I call the ‘Owl of Minerva’ school of literature. As the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, so they, in flight from the system, made their reckoning with it.’
The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones
Stanley Booth
‘It had been nearly six years since the Stones played in English clubs where sweat condensed on the walls and people swung from the rafters.’
The Cabin
Raymond Carver
‘Yell defiance until his chest hurt, at the hawks that circled and circled over the meadow.’
Danner, 1965
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘She was sliding down on the seat under him and it was like the soundtrack at the drive-in – a surface closed over her.’
The Guardian and Sarah Tisdall
David Caute
‘Sarah Tisdall belongs to a generation which has inherited from us a world sewn thick with 50,000 nuclear warheads.’
Resistance
Günter Grass
‘Isn’t it already apparent how the peace movement is slowing down, flagging, impotent?’
Prison-Scribe
Breyten Breytenbach
‘In prison everybody eventually finds his own function in terms of his usefulness to the inmate community.’
Christmas in Nicaragua
Peter Davis
‘Soaring and plunging, the revolution is like a kite in an uncertain wind.’
Julio Cortázar, 1914-84
Gabriel García Márquez
‘I felt he was the most impressive person I've known.’
Notes from New York
James Wolcott
‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’
