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The Imagination of Disaster

Mary Gordon

‘We live knowing not only that we will die, that we may suffer, but that all that we hold dear will finish; that there will be no more familiar.’

The Bridge

David Mamet

‘Surely the world was going to end. And probably in fire - in nuclear destruction, by mistake, or at the hands of madmen.’

Desert Island Discs

George Steiner

‘His requests did stretch the resources, almost all-encompassing, of the sound-archive. But that is part of the game.’

The Accordion Player

John Berger

‘He played it as loud as he could, as though he hoped the music would remind the hay in the barn above of green grass and blue cornflowers.’

What Were You Dreaming?

Nadine Gordimer

‘And I'm careful what I say, I tell them about the blacks, how too many people spoil it for us, they robbing and killing, you can't blame white people.’

A Queer Streak Part Two: Possession

Alice Munro

‘He thinks he remembers Violet coming for supper, as she sometimes did, bringing with her a pudding which she set outside in the snow, to keep it cool.’

Fiction by Alice Munro.

A Conversation Piece

George Steiner

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

Haunted

Seamus Deane

‘If we destroy it in another, we destroy it in ourselves.’

Punishable Innocence

Breyten Breytenbach

‘Here I live now in an old house next to a mourning autumn tree. How I got here I shall never be able to explain.’

Paramilitarism in Costa del Burger

Todd McEwen

‘So I got on my bicycle. Bicycle of Pain. I pedalled slowly agonizingly slowly away from the house.’

Eddie-baby

Eddie Limonov

‘Usually taciturn and self-absorbed, on that day Eddie bombarded the teachers with witticisms and cheeky, caustic remarks, for which the French mistress, shaken, sent him out of the classroom.’

Alpes Maritimes

William Boyd

‘From the small terrace at Cherry's villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbour lights and headlamps of cars on the coast road.’

Weaning

Adam Mars-Jones

‘As he grew up he would drink, and likewise urinate, without embarrassment. Snacks, so long as they were light and informal, were liquids: casual and seemly.’

Miracles

Josef Škvorecký

‘It was already dusk, a conspicuously symbolic black cloud was rising in the east, lit from the opposite direction by the orange and gold rays of the sun wreathed in a Technicolor sunset.’