Fort-de-France
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Certain Thoughts Arising out of being Pointed out by my Two-year-old Son
Raymond Tallis
‘I was also unable to imagine that future years would generate a pair of green-brown eyes which would look at me, a little brain that would recognize me, a small mouth that would re-christen me 'Daddy’.’
Milan Kundera | Interview
Milan Kundera & Ian McEwan
‘If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history.’ Ian McEwan interviews Milan Kundera in 1984.
Soul and Body
Milan Kundera
‘What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of the body and soul, banish perhaps even time.’
Somewhere Behind
Milan Kundera
‘There are periods in modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.’
A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out
Milan Kundera
‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’
Outside the Whale
Salman Rushdie
‘For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell, ‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own world-view.’
Testimonial
Martha Gellhorn
‘Governments think big; they think geopolitically. Human rights are irrelevant to geopolitics. This may kill us all in the end.’
Mystery without End
Gabriel García Márquez
‘In a city where everyone knows everyone else and where there are secret agents everywhere - from the military, the police and the security forces - it's hard to believe that he was not found out.’
Cheap Intellectuals
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘Europeans want a fictitious Latin America on to which they can project their own desires. They want a Latin America which satisfies a longing for political engagement that is not possible in their own countries.’
Human Moments in World War III
Don DeLillo
‘Happiness is not a fact of this experience, at least not to the extent that one is bold enough to speak of it.’
Deeper into the Heart of Borneo (Part II)
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘James, resplendent in leopard skin and hornbill feathers, looked even more solemn than is his habit.’
The Night Shift
Jay McInerney
‘You see yourself as the kind of guy who appreciates a quiet night at home with a good book. A little Mozart on the speakers, a cup of cocoa on the arm of the chair, slippers on the feet.’
Chile
Ariel Dorfman
‘But it is not only external, physical problems that Chilean culture is facing. By suddenly being forced into the open, artists and intellectuals are now coming up against an internal dilemma.’
Editorial
Bill Buford
‘Certainly the most obvious attraction of travel writing is in what it represents: escape.’
Watching the Rain in Galicia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘Only then did I understand where my grandmother had got that credulity which allowed her to live in a supernatural world in which everything was possible and where rational explanations were totally lacking in validity.’
One Less Octopus at Paxos
Russell Hoban
‘She fired the speargun, then held up the spear with an octopus writhing on it. It was a mottled pinky-brown and its head was about as big as two clasped hands.’
Sea-Room
Jonathan Raban
‘As it was, it did at least put a precise figure on the complaint from which I’d been suffering for the last few months: I was just six degrees and one minute out of kilter with where I was supposed to be.’
Road to Cambodia
James Fenton
‘The buildings were full of surprises. In one, surrounded by winking lights, the last abbot was lying in his coffin. He had died a year before, and it would be another two years before he was cremated.’
Into the Heart of Borneo
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘At dawn the jungle was half-obscured in a heavy morning mist; and through the cloudy layers of rising moisture came the whooping call, the owl-like, clear, ringing hoot of the female Borneo Gibbon.’
Night In Vietnam
Colin Thubron
‘The tombstones glimmered in the grass. But he felt only relief. The dead, tonight, were more companionable than the living.’
White into Black
Martha Gellhorn
‘It is hard to believe that, in 1952, there were only two places on earth where blacks could not be insulted or mistreated simply because of their colour: Haiti and Liberia.’
In Stevenson’s Footsteps
Richard Holmes
‘But Stevenson was still three or four hours ahead of me. He crossed the stone bridge into Langogne in the early afternoon of Monday 23 September 1878, ‘just as the promised rain was beginning to fall.’’
Village of Cats
Norman Lewis
‘It was a time for enmities to be put aside, and alliances cemented wherever they could be found, but Farol and Sort turned their backs on one another, and went their separate ways towards an obscure fate.’
Old Paris
Saul Bellow
‘Who would have thought that Europe contained so much old junk? Or that, the servant class having disappeared, hearts nostalgic for the bourgeois epoch would hunt so eagerly for Empire breakfronts, Récamier sofas and curule chairs?’
Holy Week
Patrick Marnham
‘They carried the life-size wooden figure lying in the glass case out of the main doors of the church and into the churchyard.’
Interstate 281
Jan Morris
‘The insularity of Texas has always entertained travellers, coupled as it is with extreme technical sophistication, and Texans of course love to make the most of it.’
Subterranean Gothic
Paul Theroux
‘When people says the subway frightens them, they are not being silly or irrational.’
Jim’s Journey
Hugh Brody
‘Jim’s visit had not been easy. He arrived a day after the English Armada had been launched on its way to the South Atlantic.’
Notes from Italy
William Weaver
‘It was easy to meet people, especially if you were a wide-eyed American and spoke Italian. The literary world was particularly accessible, for all the intellectuals wanted to know about the States.’
The Bird of Paradise Lost
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
‘Hudson had been a professional collector of birds in the pampas as a young man, employed first by the Smithsonian in the United States.’
The Boat Train
Russell Hoban
‘The train wheels, now authorized to take up their song of distance, clacked and clattered their traditional shanty of miles.’
