Issue 27

Chris Petit

‘One afternoon I woke up in a porno cinema with no memory of getting there.’

Chris Petit

‘If there were any sense of cultural justice in this country, the Westway – that chunk of concrete modernism – would be renamed after J.G. Ballard.’

Issue 86

Chris Petit

‘From an early age I stalked movies for clues to a life I didn't understand.’

Pamela Petro

‘No one who’s seen The Hill has been able to describe it to me without visceral discomfort. Actually, no one’s been able to describe it at all.’

Timothy Phillips

A case of Russian espionage from Tim Phillips' book The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians, and the Jazz Age.

Issue 43

Caryl Phillips

‘Curling herself into a tight fist against the cold, Martha huddled in the doorway and wondered if tonight she might see snow.‘

Issue 71

Justine Picardie

Issue 142

DBC Pierre

‘The mask said everything. This was a thief. A schemer and a thief.’

Issue 16

Darryl Pinckney

‘My Anglophilia was something like haemophilia - that is, I was easily bruised by facts so stayed away from them.’

Harold Pinter

‘Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed. We tell when it ceases to beat and tell it at its highest peak of fever‘, Harold Pinter in 'A Note on Shakespeare' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.

Elizabeth Pisani

‘The air is light with the intoxicating fumes of impending martyrdom.’

Issue 64

Andrei Platonov

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

Edward Platt

‘It was like stepping into the interior of a submarine.’

Joanna Pocock

‘How could having sex with the Earth ever be consensual?’