Issue 116

Nadeem Aslam

‘It is as though the metal itself is bleeding.’

Reinaldo Arenas

‘Perfect totalitarian systems have always been in the vanguard: they modify not only the past and the future, but they also abolish the present.’

Issue 24

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.’

Issue 72

Robyn Davidson

’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.

Issue 83

Christopher de Bellaigue

‘As I observed the foreigners at the museum, who turned out mostly to be archaeologists, two American soldiers crossed towards the group.’

Issue 57

Urvashi Butalia

‘Stories are all that people have, stories that rarely breach the frontiers of family and religious community’

Issue 76

Robyn Davidson

‘Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb.’

Naomi Alderman

‘Thank you, God,’ said the boys, ‘for not making me a woman.’ ‘Thank you, God,’ said the girls, ‘for making me according to Your will.’

Ike Anya

‘Who will speak out for us now? Who will ask the hard questions of us and the world that he did?’

Issue 30

Joseph Brodsky

‘Nothing, really, Petrovich. That Georgian, you know, that foreign minister of theirs, says that half an hour ago, Himself announced at a press conference that democracy is being introduced here.’

Issue 65

Ferdinand Dennis

Issue 103

Daniel Alarcón

‘There was no question we were underwater.’

Azhar Abidi

‘I wonder sometimes when this cycle of violence began. When was year zero?’

Kazushige Abe

‘The crucial thing was to cool the baby off, bring the fever down.’