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An Escape from Kampala
Wycliffe Kato
‘‘Be brave,’ she said, ‘pull yourself together. What you are about to see is worse than you ever imagined.’ She asked if I knew what Winston Churchill had called Uganda. He had called it the pearl of Africa.’
Ange Mlinko | First Sentence
Ange Mlinko
‘I rediscovered the efficacy of meter (or the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’) when I was stuck in a shark tunnel with my kids and was afraid I was coming down with a panic attack.’
Anlong Veng | Dispatches
Elena Lesley
‘There are no words to say how angry I am. I want to know why they killed their own people. I want answers.’
Aphrodisiacs I Have Known
Norman Lewis
‘In the winter of 1957, I went to Liberia for the New Yorker.’
Arrival
Albino Ochero-Okello
‘As I stood in front of the immigration officer, I was already worrying about my answers to the questions he might ask’.
As They Laid Down Their Cables
Laleh Khalili
‘The Eilat–Ashkelon pipeline went into operation in 1969, on the eve of the nationalisation of oil.’
Laleh Khalili on energy politics and the ‘secret’ pipeline transporting crude oil across southern Israel.
Aspirers
Pankaj Mishra
‘Bollywood is part of what our culture has become. We are lying to ourselves all the time.’
Bad Nature
Javier Marías
‘I saw him slipping into belligerence, the ghost of James Dean descended upon him and sent a shiver down my spine.’
Baht ’At
Blake Morrison
‘I'd already begun to suspect that sex brought misery or death, and now I knew.’
Beirut Fragments, 2021
Charif Majdalani
‘We live with the permanent sense of imminent disaster.’
Charif Majdalani on the situation in Beirut. Translated from the French by Ruth Diver.
Bell And Langley
Thomas McMahon
‘He said that new ideas only came to him between these hours, and when they did, they were like recollections of things forgotten. Sometimes he put on his hat and coat at two a. m. and walked ten miles, the way a mourner will do when he is trying to recall the sight of a beloved face.’
