‘The men were quiet. They said nothing for a minute and the sea at my back was calm and almost imaginary, but you could hear the waves coming to wash the chalk cliffs from under us.’
I came to London after graduation and found a bedsit off Kensington Church Street, a place of antique shops; there was a tree that came up to my window on the top floor and a caged lift down to the street. Early in the mornings I walked across Hyde Park to a swimming pool at Lancaster Gate. There wa…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Human nature is not improved by concealment, especially when it comes to the past.’
A short story by Andrew O’Hagan.
‘A lot of journalism was in danger of becoming ‘celebrity writing’, in the sense that the writer and his conscience could become the story.’
‘Every time I drink a glass of claret it goes straight to my face.’
‘Now that everyone lives as if in a movie, we begin to forget that once it was only special people who did.’
‘Those words made me wonder why I ever wanted to be an artist, why I ever wanted to live, though I never thought I wanted to die.’
