‘He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate: Mental death.’
Clean and scented, with a dull, near pleasurable ache in his limbs, driving west in light traffic, Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, finds he’s feeling better about seeing his mother. He knows the routine well enough. Once they’re established together, face to face, with their cups of dark brown te…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterwards would not let him go.’
‘If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history.’ Ian McEwan interviews Milan Kundera in 1984.
‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’
‘How do you love a monster when they are no longer monstrous?’
New fiction by Diana Evans.
‘I turn to O’Connor’s music when I get tired of lying to myself. Her songs are allegorical free-falls. Spiritual chiaroscuros, even.’
Momtaza Mehri on Sinéad O’Connor.
‘As the economy declined African Americans became a larger part of a shrinking and impoverished city.’
Gary Younge introduces the photography of Cian Oba-Smith.
