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You Want Gunfire With That?

Dan Hind

‘The end of Soviet communism was supposed to have brought with it the end of ideological struggle and even, according to a significant few, history itself.’

Feeding the Fire: The Political Context of 9/11

Adam Haslett

‘9/11 was the bullet to the powder keg of an already heated domestic conflict.’

At War With Writing About War

Gabe Hudson

‘Perhaps a more precise and academicish moniker for War Literature would be, Suicide Averted In Favour of Writing.’

Unplanned Road Trip

David Guterson

‘I had a dark, journalistic interest in Ground Zero but also, apprehension.’

Somalia Then and Now

Mary Harper

‘Madam, you are a potential terrorist. You and every other person in this room.’

A Tale of Two Martyrs

Tahar Ben Jelloun

‘You spend your life swallowing insults.’

Crossbones

Nuruddin Farah

‘In a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.’

The Third Mate

Adam Johnson

‘Please translate that this man is about to get shot.’

In a Land of Silence

Janine di Giovanni

‘She tells me that he died because he refused to be silent.’

The Terminal Check

Pico Iyer

‘The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity.’

The Politics of Grief

V. V. Ganeshananthan

‘It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn.’

1911, The Other Revolution

Isabel Hilton

‘Anniversaries, of course, can be a two-edged sword: they invite historical reappraisal.’

Memory and Invention

Mavis Gallant

‘When I happened to be working all day, every day, on a story set in the Paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of the cars, the casual clothing and clean facades of the 1990s.’

The Blazing Light in August

Gabriel Gbadamosi

‘The basic social contract that I won’t break the law by being in a riot and that, in return, my society will keep me safe is being ripped apart in this confrontation with the hard reality of violence: we must break them or they will break us.’