British - Novelist | 1945 -
As Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers' rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women.
Justin Cartwright
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The plane approaches Cape Town and, as always, I am astonished by the view of Table Mountain and the surrounding sea. It is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I feel the urge to belong - not necessarily to the people, but to the landscape.
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I write from what I take to be the realist's point of view, looking at life as it really is - or the way I see it to be.
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Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time, I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact, he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India.
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James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave.
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This is the strange thing about South Africa - for all its corruption and crime, it seems to offer a stimulating sense that anything is possible.
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A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.
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I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think 'Pigeon Feathers' was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.
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I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me.
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So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.
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A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.
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I thought I'd write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn't have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died.
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