‘Generalisations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion.’
Generalizations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion. In 1997, the great crowds who mourned the death of the Princess of Wales with their tears, flowers and candles were taken as evidence that British behaviour had utterly changed. We were at…
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Doctors, solitude and the stones within us – for fiction about isolation, it has to be Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
‘Things have changed without seeking permission.’ A plague diary of this March, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.
‘Our view of the morning’s entertainment was restricted by the width of the door frame.’ Bruce Chatwin writes about his imprisonment during a coup in Benin.
‘A leech bodes this: you will, sooner or later, overflow yourself. ’ Rebecca Giggs on leeches and the borders of the human body.
‘Her eyes fluttered open and I felt like I was at the edge of the mouth of a cave, with every intention of jumping in.’ For pure escapism, lose yourself in the nineteenth-century Paris of Carmen Maria Machado.
‘Feelings of hate and despair dwindle as they pass down the generations.’
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
‘Travel writing of most kinds, not just the humorous, has the history of colonialism perched on its shoulder.’
‘I wanted to write a minimalist romance, so I needed to have plenty of Love and Death. A dead human heart is both.’
