Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 18: The Snap Revolution
Spring 1986
‘We had found our way, we realized, into the Marcoses’ private rooms. It seemed to me that in every room I saw, practically on every available surface, there was a signed photograph of Nancy Reagan. But this can hardly be true. It just felt as if there was a lot of Nancy in evidence.’ Also in this issue: Seamus Deane, Primo Levi, David Hare, and John Berger.
From this Issue
|Granta 18
Tadpoles
Primo Levi
‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’
|Granta 18
Thoughts of a Storyteller on a Happy Ending
Gianni Celati
‘By inserting pages or just strips of paper at the points which needed changing he transformed their conclusion, to bring them always to a happy ending.’
|Granta 18
Desert Island Discs
George Steiner
‘His requests did stretch the resources, almost all-encompassing, of the sound-archive. But that is part of the game.’
|Granta 18
The Snap Revolution (Part One: The Snap Election)
James Fenton
‘It was the Cuba of the future. It was going the way of Iran. It was another Nicaragua, another Cambodia, another Vietnam.’
|Granta 18
The Snap Revolution (Part Two: The Narrow Road to the Solid North)
James Fenton
‘Most of his life has been spent under Marcos's rule, and his habit of thought was to doubt the story as presented in, say, the newspaper, and to try to guess the story behind the story.’
|Granta 18
The Snap Revolution (Part Three: The Snap Revolution)
James Fenton
‘Late that night Marcos came on the television again, and whereas in the previous press conference he had maintained a gelid calm, now he was angry and almost out of control.’
|Granta 18
Aquino, Marcos and the White House
Mark Malloch Brown
‘Marcos had, in effect, trapped Washington into appearing to endorse a snap election, and the administration - both State Department and White House - was forced to redefine its position.’
|Granta 18
The Accordion Player
John Berger
‘He played it as loud as he could, as though he hoped the music would remind the hay in the barn above of green grass and blue cornflowers.’
|Granta 18
Wetness
Adam Nicolson
‘The eel is perfect, in its sheen of efficiency, its introversion, scarcely distinct from the place it makes its own, like a cancer, spread into every cell of the moors.’
|Granta 18
Joint Stock: A Memoir
David Hare
‘Of all art forms the theatre is most susceptible to fashion.’
