Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 26: Travel
Spring 1989
This travel issue is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Chatwin with four unpublished pieces by one of the world’s greatest travel writers. Also in this issue: Ryszard Kapuscinski, John Ryle, Colin Thubron and Timothy Garton Ash, Bill Bryson and Amitav Ghosh.
From this Issue
|Granta 26
Polisario
Jeremy Harding
‘The wall began to look impressive, but its lethargy, the lack of activity anywhere along it, was exasperating.’
|Granta 26
The Road to Abyei
John Ryle
‘Bor is a long way from Khartoum – more than 700 miles. There were other hostile groups on the way and precious little food.’
|Granta 26
The Bey
Bruce Chatwin
‘“Ha!” said the old gentleman. “I see you have The Eye. I too have The Eye. We shall be friends.”’
|Granta 26
Konstantin Melnikov: Architect
Bruce Chatwin
‘The death-knell of visionary architecture in Russia had already been sounded when Lenin's commissioner for enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, announced, “The people also have a right to colonnades.”’
|Granta 26
The Old Silk Route
Colin Thubron
‘If I had charted the most landlocked spot on earth, the arms of my compass would have intersected here, in China's far northwest.’
|Granta 26
Siam
Norman Lewis
‘Little surprise was aroused when the model chosen for the new Hat Yai was Dodge City of the 1860s as revealed by the movies.’
|Granta 26
Taiwan
Ian Buruma
‘It is extremely expensive and almost entirely symbolic, for the struggle itself is symbolic, waged mostly by the Political Warfare Department.’
|Granta 26
Saigon Dreaming
Tela Zasloff
‘In the summer of 1964, when we arrived in Saigon, our house belonged to the United States military, whose cheerful Vietnamese employees moved us in.’
|Granta 26
More Fat Girls in Des Moines
Bill Bryson
‘I didn't really expect my grandparents to be waiting for me at the gate, on account of them both having been dead for many years.’
|Granta 26
Warsaw Notebook
Timothy Garton Ash
‘Underground groups are called ‘structures’. Some people offer friends the service of their ‘structures’. This makes them important. Then it turns out the structures don't exist.’
|Granta 26
Murderer in the Family (Part Two)
Rian Malan
‘It's not just their skins that are white; their minds are white, too. They are generic whites with western values.’
|Granta 26
Moscow
Patrick Cockburn
‘Despite all the secrecy, what was happening in the Soviet Union was obvious enough: the old order, the wartime generation, was dying.’
