‘If you like people who hate each other, it’s paradise.’
Now that I’m no longer living in India, whenever there’s a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
‘What clipped the wings of her fiction and grounded her imagination was precisely what made her soar as a journalist.’
‘By coming to Tasmania, I'd repeated the pattern of an ancient, unknown relative and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way.’
‘At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras.‘
‘They called him Presidente Gonzalo, but his name was Abimael Guzmán. I had come to Lima to find Guzmán, although I knew I wouldn't succeed.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
Danny Denton on why Fran Lock’s Dogtooth and Gavin Corbett’s The Giving Light are the best books of 2017.
