Sigrid Rausing

‘Possession takes many forms, and at the heart of it is death and dereliction, invasion and submission.’

Issue 15

George Steiner

‘No. Listen to me. God's confidence in Abraham was not total. Let me hammer out my meaning.’

Santiago Roncagliolo

‘My earliest memory of Peru is a newspaper photograph from 1980 of dead dogs hanging from lamp posts in downtown Lima.’

Issue 130

Samanth Subramanian

‘There are clubs like the Breach Candy Club all over the Indian subcontinent: relics of the Raj, institutions that were set up as bolt-holes for the British, where they could retreat to row or swim or play cricket or race horses.’

Issue 96

David Peace

‘The song, the voice, and the heat; men on their knees, heads in hands, sobbing and now howling.’

Issue 7

Lisa St Aubin de Terán

‘The freezing of the money signalled the beginning of virtual penury. It also signalled the beginning of our fame.’

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had.’

Issue 119

Robin Robertson

Andre Perry

‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.

Issue 64

Andrei Platonov

‘Grass had grown back on the trodden-down dirt tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped.’

Roy Robins

‘This conflation of hard-nosed realism and bright-eyed idealism has confused the aims of the award.’

Issue 90

Richard Powers

‘Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students’

Anita Sethi

‘At four o’clock in the morning, when Louis de Bernières has lines of poetry repeating in his head which won’t stop gnawing away, he writes them down.‘

Issue 8

Elizabeth Tallent

‘The harmonica player is left standing alone in the light, talking to himself. He cleans the spit from his instrument with a white handkerchief so old it is nearly transparent.’