Issue 115

Francine Prose

‘Feminism is as basic to my sense of self as the fact that I have brown eyes.’

Francine Prose

‘Anglophilia is constantly thrumming on, or just under, the surface of our culture.’

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust’s letters to his neighbour, translated from the French by Lydia Davis.

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner on how Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court, manage to write the first great novel of world literature.

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner on ten books that have changed the course of world history.

Natasha Pulley

‘There’s a mysticism that surrounds writing fiction.’

Issue 76

Philip Pullman

‘It feels like being a child in a room where adults are having a deep and passionate conversation about important things’

Philip Pullman

Jianan Qian

‘For every witness, history unfolded at some other time, and in some other place.’ Jianan Qian on the first sentence of her story, ‘To the Dogs’.

Jianan Qian

Jianan Qian on why Yu Hua’s To Live is the best book of 1993.

Issue 10

Jonathan Raban

‘As it was, it did at least put a precise figure on the complaint from which I’d been suffering for the last few months: I was just six degrees and one minute out of kilter with where I was supposed to be.’

Jonathan Raban

‘Man is a visitor who does not remain.’

Issue 49

Jonathan Raban

‘What the bottom line always comes to is the old two a.m. cry: We can’t go on living like this.’

Jonathan Raban

‘It began as a vacuum in the atmosphere, far out over the Atlantic. Trying to fill itself, it set up a spinning mass of air, like a plughole sucking water from a bath; but the faster the winds blew, the more the vacuum deepened.’