Issue 73

John Ryle

‘Twenty-five years after his death, His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Elect of God, Defender of the Faith,was finally being laid to rest, though they still could not be certain how he met his end.’

John Ryle attends the funeral of Haile Sellasie.

Issue 74

Martin Chambí & Amanda Hopkinson

‘Chambi's mission was to portray the dignity and traditions of his people through their lives and labours, and he was well aware of the significance of his undertaking.’

Issue 73

Decca Aitkenhead

‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.

Issue 73

James Campbell

David Feuer

‘Probably, the Rabbi would have preferred to find a Hasidic psychiatrist, but unfortunately there was no such thing.’

Issue 74

Christopher de Bellaigue

Christophe de Bellaigue on what happened when free speech came to the ayatollahs' Tehran.

Dayanita Singh & Sunil Khilnani

‘Nirmala Chakravarty, a young and beautiful Shakta mystic from East Bengal, known to her followers as Anandamayi, first came to the city of Benares in 1928’.

Simon Winchester

‘How do you persuade a thousand dogs to walk into a fire? How do you persuade them, as it were, to commit suttee?’

Issue 73

Ryszard Kapuściński

‘One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest or with any equatorial jungle.’

Issue 74

Nicholas Shakespeare

‘By coming to Tasmania, I'd repeated the pattern of an ancient, unknown relative and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way.’

Isabel Hilton

‘There is nobody to blame but the Communist Party. They had absolute control during the fifty years it took to destroy Beijing, and they had the chance to develop a modern, civilized city.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘I am looking for my dead grandfather in the British Library.’

Issue 72

Joseph O’Neill

‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’

Issue 72

James Hamilton-Paterson

‘Maybe the trick is to find your surroundings so engrossing, so diverting, as to be unaware that anyone is missing you. The chances are nobody is’.