Issue 65

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes shares a view of London from his childhood.

Issue 65

Helen Simpson

‘There had been an unbelievable amount of talk about the weather, not to mention the end of the world and so on’.

Issue 65

David Sylvester

‘When you turn your back on the view, you're face to face with the Western Pumping Station across the street and its campanile-like tower.’

Issue 65

Jay Rayner

Doris Lessing

‘No one driving along it could possibly guess the truth.’

Issue 65

Penelope Lively

A cat walks across the empty tarmac of the yard. The place is once more local and domestic.

Amit Chaudhuri

‘Those who stayed on had their reasons. . . and none of those reasons, it is safe to suppose, had anything to do with an overwhelming attachment to England.’

An essay by Amit Chaudhuri.

Issue 65

Graham Swift

‘Sometimes it haunts you like a knell, sometimes it's the motto for unimagined privilege.’

Andrew O'Hagan

‘I used to wake up next to Boadicea.’

Issue 64

Colin Thubron

‘The faintly clownish name of Omsk raises light-hearted expectations.’

Issue 64

Angus Macqueen

‘In these circumstances man becomes like an animal: silent and bowed. You never said a word.’

Issue 64

Orlando Figes

’There are times when every nation needs to think a little less about its history.‘

Issue 64

Anna Pyasetskaya & Heidi Bradner

‘If a star began to fall it meant that a plane was preparing to bomb.’

Issue 64

Andrei Platonov

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