Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 56: What Happened to Us?
Winter 1996
This issue freezes the frame on Britain before the 1997 election: a country that has rarely been so nervous (don’t mention the beef) or so fundamentally troubled. Is this a nation, a way of life, saying farewell to itself? Jeremy Seabrook, Hanif Kureishi, Hilary Mantel, Fintan O’Toole, and fiction by John Banville (on the making of a very British traitor).
From this Issue
|Granta 56
The Enemy Within
John Banville
‘Feeling almost skittish all day. Exhausted now yet feverish also, like a child at the end of a party.’
|Granta 56
Imagining Scotland
Fintan O’Toole
‘There they found a man and a woman dressed in face masks, rubber gloves and white coats standing behind a white table on which were placed an assortment of tools’
|Granta 56
Assault by Water
Tim Binding
‘Having come here for a purpose, to trace the fault line of his own history, he searches for the year that saw its inception.’
|Granta 56
God Bless the Squire
Norman Lewis
‘From the age of five I attended Forty Hill Church School. Studies began every day with half an hour's catechism.’
|Granta 56
Uncles
Jonathan Meades
‘Uncle Donald the boffin, Uncle Cecil the pharmacist, Uncle Edgar the optician and Uncle Edgar the boho restaurateur’
|Granta 56
Trying to Understand
Philip Hensher
‘I liked his humourless intelligence, so redundant and so excessive in an MP.’
|Granta 56
The Last Post
Simon Winchester
‘It is the roar, however, that is most magnificent and daunting’
