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Best of Young British Novelists 2003: Introduction
Ian Jack
‘What had been an exercise to publicize the literary novel, at a time when there were few spotlights on this particular branch of culture, might now have a new role as an independent consumer's guide to novelists who deserved to be read in an era where 'a thrilling debut by a young writer of enormous talent' is the standard blurb, and where there are now so many spotlights directed by marketing money and the size of the writer's advance.’
Nicaragua
Christopher Hitchens
‘Nicaragua has always impelled its writers into politics, or exile, or both.’
Dividing the Kingdom
Pico Iyer
‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’
The Fall of Saigon
James Fenton
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
Arguing With The Dead
Dan Jacobson
‘My childhood was spent in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in South Africa.In those years most of the mines were no longer being worked’.
A Journey into Afghanistan
Peregrine Hodson
‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’
Motley Notes
Ian Jack
‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’
Janesville, Wisconsin
Steven Greenhouse
‘To them, the emphasis was on the ‘creative’ part of creative destruction. But in Janesville, few could see beyond the destruction.’
On Harley-Davidson
Richard Ford
‘Jack Nicholson, I've heard, used to own one. And I understand why.’