Dispatches

‘When I finally reached Magadan, I hunted for days for a survivor. “I’m sorry, they are all dead,“ was the refrain. With male life-expectancy in Russia a mere 58, I should not have been surprised, but I was devastated’

‘I look around the dimly-lit bar and notice how the hard-drinking clientele watches suspicious newcomers like me, with my British-tainted accent and far too many questions. I ask another one: “Do the Hell’s Angels come here, Brian?” Bingo.’

‘I cursed and gaped. I closed and reopened the web site and there it all was again, three years of work, plus debt and lack of medical care and some rather bizarre house-sitting to save on rent while I finished the manuscript on a small advance, with the promise of rewards in proportion to the book’s sales.’

Russians cling to the idea of being a great power, even though the quest for empire has become illusory and self-destructive. Can a new generation change this?

For more than 50 years Martin Heidegger worked up in the mountain resort of Todtnauberg, at a simple desk looking east. It is not surprising that the philosopher chose to dwell in a world that has changed very little since his day. 

‘Russians think about blacks, Jews and women in the way Europeans did a generation ago’

‘In the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene wrote triumphalist Catholic novels with miracles as part of the story — Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair. They were bestsellers. Since Vatican II, however, the tenor of Catholic fiction has been doubt, dissent and disillusion.’

‘In February 2007, a naked, emaciated, mutilated, charred and stabbed man is discovered near railway tracks in the Parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois. He is taken to hospital where he is pronounced dead just before noon.’