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Murderer in the Family (Part Two)
Rian Malan
‘It's not just their skins that are white; their minds are white, too. They are generic whites with western values.’
Moscow
Patrick Cockburn
‘Despite all the secrecy, what was happening in the Soviet Union was obvious enough: the old order, the wartime generation, was dying.’
Gibraltar
Ian Jack
‘Everyone had theories which to a greater or lesser extent conflicted with the story in court.’
Ian Jack on the inquest into the SAS killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar.
Friendship
Raymond Carver
‘But when I look again at this picture that was taken three years ago in London, after a fiction reading, my heart moves, and I'm nearly fooled into thinking that friendship is a permanent thing.’
Raymond Carver, 1938 to 1988
Tess Gallagher
‘We were married in Reno, Nevada. It was a very Carveresque affair, held in the little Heart of Reno Chapel across from the courthouse. Afterwards we went gambling at Harrah's Club and with every turn of the wheel I won. I couldn't stop winning.’
Delinquent in Derry
Nik Cohn
‘Across the river, in a Catholic enclave in the Waterside district, there was a disused funeral home in which, three nights a week, at 6d a shot, contraband teen movies could be sat through and sometimes seen, according to the state of the projector.’
Means of Transport
John Berger
‘Use these photos as means of transport. Ride on them. No passes needed. Go close. Imprudently close. They leave every minute.’
John Berger on images of violent dispossession from South Africa and Lesotho.
Murderer in the Family
Rian Malan
‘'m just going to lay this all upon you and trust that you are a visionary reader, because the grand design, such as it is, is going to be very hard for you to see.’
The Albatross
Bruce Chatwin
‘On the south side of the Beagle Channel is the Chilean island of Navarino, with its naval base at Puerto Williams. I hoped to walk around the coast and get a glimpse of Hermit Island, which is the breeding colony of the black-browed Albatross.’
Inside Intelligence
Anthony Cavendish
‘Good heavens, old boy! It isn't the Russians we worry about; it's the British public that we don't want to know about it.’
Fortune
Tobias Wolff
‘We’d left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed west under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam.’
A Letter to Our Son
Peter Carey
‘We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison's face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.’
Kwangju and After
James Fenton
‘Some people said they were not ‘with’ the students. They were not in favour of the use of arms. But they were of one voice in saying that the students were their sons, and that if the army came in the students would be put to death. That was why they kept saying: “Tell the truth about us.”’
James Fenton on the Gwanju massacre.
