'I met Ian Fleming at Cape's annual party. Jonathan Cape made no secret of disliking Fleming, had read only the first chapter of Casino Royale and nothing whatever of his subsequent books.'
I met Ian Fleming at Cape’s annual party. Jonathan Cape made no secret of disliking Fleming, had read only the first chapter of Casino Royale and nothing whatever of his subsequent books, but reluctantly accepted that he was likely to become the firm’s best-selling author since T. E. Lawrence.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘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.
‘It was a time for enmities to be put aside, and alliances cemented wherever they could be found, but Farol and Sort turned their backs on one another, and went their separate ways towards an obscure fate.’
‘In the 1930s I wanted to travel and I wanted to write. In 1935, I published my first book—about a journey to Spain’.
‘From the age of five I attended Forty Hill Church School. Studies began every day with half an hour's catechism.’
‘In the winter of 1957, I went to Liberia for the New Yorker.’
‘Little surprise was aroused when the model chosen for the new Hat Yai was Dodge City of the 1860s as revealed by the movies.’
‘They’re the interchangeable anonymous people we encounter on our daily commute, those whose humanity we cannot acknowledge.’
