‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
One afternoon in the autumn of 1933 the writer J. B. Priestley drove north from Manchester towards Preston and Blackpool. Priestley was then England’s most successful young novelist. Not yet forty, with five novels and the international success of The Good Companions behind him, he had decided as …
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‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
Ian Jack on the legacy of the Scottish textile bleaching industry.
‘When the world releases him from its oily grip will there still be a world?’
Fiction by Dan Shurley, featuring the 2019 explosion of an oil refinery in Philadelphia.
‘Black waves bring animals to the town’s shore. Sticky corpses float on the oil.’
Ariel Saramandi on the sinking of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius.
‘None of us hung out with them or knew them really, except two boys in our class, who stopped going to school after crude oil became such a big deal.’
A story by Claudia Durastanti, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris.
‘His best photographs are expressionistic, almost calligraphic, as though he’s displaying the hidden signatures our collective appetites have etched across the Earth.’
Anthony Doerr introduces the photography of Edward Burtynsky.
‘Feelings of hate and despair dwindle as they pass down the generations.’
‘Generalisations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion.’
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
‘It feels like being a child in a room where adults are having a deep and passionate conversation about important things’
