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My Grandmother, the Censor
Masha Gessen
‘Where do crimes begin and end, and who, decades later, can be held responsible?’
The Last Eighteen Drops
Vitali Vitaliev
‘Drinking vodka is just a memory for me now. Vodka was hurting me.’
The Romanovs Come to Stay
Frances Welch
‘When I was a child I seemed to live in a fog of inattention which cleared only when I was alone.’
Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
The Boy Who Watched the Ships Go By
Orhan Pamuk
‘For the last thirty years I've been keeping track of the ships that sail through the Bosporus.’
Lingua Franca
Luc Sante
‘In order to write of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about someone else. As a boy, I lived in French; now, I live in English.’
Whooah . . . Pizza!
Pierre Merle
The following examples of contemporary French slang come from Le Dico de l'Argot fin-de-siècle compiled by a Parisian journalist, Pierre Merle.
Agnès
René Belletto
‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.
The Farm at Le Garet
Raymond Depardon
‘On days when the light is beautiful, when the sun is red above the Saône, I find myself regretting not having come more often when my parents were working the farm.’
The Case of Stephen Lawrence
Brian Cathcart
‘Stephen Lawrence was murdered on the night of 22 April 1993, in Eltham, a south-eastern suburb of London.‘
A Note on Shakespeare
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.
The Roads of London
Doris Lessing
‘You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles.’
