‘A novelist working well and honestly, and only saying what he knows and what he understands, will in fact tell a lot of important truths about his society. This is why tyrannical societies are often frightened of novelists.’
From June 1968, an interview with Iris Murdoch.
‘I have always written in the first person. I find it extremely difficult to use the third person because we are all, deep down, incurable individualists.’
From 1985, an interview with Natalia Ginzburg.
‘What is true is that the dry as dust academic thing on the one hand and the sloppy solarplexus thing on the other, end in both cases in utter artistic death. But the writers form a great line in between those two and some are more at one end and some are more at the other.’
From 1960, an interview with Christopher Isherwood.
‘I fell into a melancholy train of thought. I wasn’t suited to live under Fascism but Fascism would win. It was the worst people who won wars.’
From 1955, short fiction by Italo Calvino.
‘When we die we become what we have loved, and were I to be vaporised tomorrow, the bulk of me would soon be staring out at the world through those topaz panes at which I now dream my life away looking in.’
Cyril Connolly on the fear of death.
‘That they have been aided by a culture which celebrates men behaving badly and football as an art form is without doubt.’
From 1997, Archie Cotterell’s take on Oasis.
‘Poetry is nothing if not the record of just how the forces of the Universe try to redress some balance disturbed by human error.’
From 1971, an interview with Ted Hughes.
‘What about the fate of our children … is there nothing to be done for them?’
This essay by Henry Miller was originally published in the July 1959 edition of The London Magazine.
‘the sunset furled / round the last post, // ‘the flamingo colours’ of a fading world, / a ghost steps from you, my grandfather’s ghost!’
From 1965, poetry by Derek Walcott.
‘If you ask me where I come from I have to start talking with broken objects, / with kitchenware that has too much bitterness, / with animals quite often rotten, / and with my heavy soul.’
From 1965, poetry by Pablo Neruda.
‘To explain meanings that are already known goes against the most important demand of literature.’
From 1965, an essay on realism by Alain Robbe-Grillet (trans. Barbara Wright).
‘I could be anyone you want me to be. / I might come round to your point of view.’
From 1994, poetry by Michael Donaghy.
‘Poetry on the grand scale, poetry in the raw, poetry on the attack, but best of all, Beat Poetry in the Albert Hall.’
From 1965, Hugo Williams reviews Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall.
‘Writing is such an un-natural activity that one has to keep in practice, like sport, or playing a musical instrument.’
From 1979, an interview with Susan Sontag.
‘We must / Go through the ritual / Formulæ of farewell, // The words, the looks, / The embraces, knowing / That this time they are final.’
From 1964, a poem by W. H. Auden.
‘When he looked at the canoes again they had changed into the shapes of swollen dead animals.’
From 1988, short fiction by Booker-prize winner, Ben Okri.
‘He loved good bad poets. Knew nothing about painting, but knew that he knew nothing. Listened as much as he talked. Was incapable of playing to the gallery. Could tell a joke against himself.’
From 1957, George Orwell’s friend, Paul Potts, pays tribute to the novelist and essayist.
‘He has become a prophet of chaos and those who once accepted him as a blue-denim Messiah of a Brotherhood future once the times had changed may sense a personal betrayal.’
In 1966, Angela Carter reviewed Bob Dylan’s World Tour.
‘At this time my husband had taken it upon himself to send for his mother to supervise the children and the atmosphere in the house was one of blinding, deafening, obsessive antagonism.’
Short fiction by Nadine Gordimer.
‘Readers must be encouraged to read books, not merely to talk about books they have not read.’
A message from T. S. Eliot, from the February 1954 edition of The London Magazine.
‘Words can be blotted and the mad thoughts they invent, all you have to do is say you said nothing and so say nothing again.’
Samuel Beckett in the August 1967 edition of The London Magazine.
‘Is he too ill to know that he is dying? / And, if he does know, does he really care?’
A poem by John Betjeman, from the May 1957 issue of The London Magazine.
‘I look in the mirror at night / And see two rooms’
This poem by Louis MacNeice originally appeared in the May 1960 edition of The London Magazine.
‘Father killed her. Not with the knife, no, nor with the pistol, nor even with the blunt instrument. It was the old weapon – hatred.’
Short fiction by Graham Swift.
