'Riding past a crowded pavement on a hot day, swallowing consecutive gusts of perfume, sunscreen, cigarette smoke, and sometimes even halitosis, you realize just how helplessly intimate we all are in this city.'
'Everybody wanted to buy a taco made by That Guy, the guy who needed to get away from his girlfriend so bad that he basically dug a hole in the ground where he could finally have a little peace.'
Part 1. 'I have at last rejected the notion that I grasp even the basics of life, of society, or the laws of the natural world, the workings of business, or even the grammar of my native language.'
'Almost no one knows / that Ulrich Gwerder, / who, dressed as a merry shepherd, / posed in 1970 for a jazzy poster / for Tourist Information / in the city of Lucerne / was – at heart – a leftie.'
Intrigue, adventure, romance, stationery. A film about the Hamish Hamilton archive, featuring Chandler, Sartre, Salinger, Thurber, Orwell and others. Music by Lights of Harmac.
Nat Damm has designed posters for Slayer, Peter Murphy, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Legendary Pink Dots, Sharon van Etten and -- what? -- Justin Bieber. This is a collection of his work for Five Dials.
'People were careless and clumsy, always letting things slip through their soft fingers, and the trees made it their business to make sure these things were not lost. They carefully stored empty crisp packets.'
For a place teeming with the ghosts of empire, hard labour, hard liquor, sailors and prostitutes, it’s almost unbearably tranquil. This Britain isn’t broken: it’s just quiet to the point of being unsettling.
'Riding past a crowded pavement on a hot day, swallowing consecutive gusts of perfume, sunscreen, cigarette smoke, and sometimes even halitosis, you realize just how helplessly intimate we all are in this city.'
'This was her grandest bid to bring something back from the ruins. She was not reading despite the bombs; she was reading with them, and the two – reading and bombs – are jumbled together in one of her last letters.'
'Escapees from St Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking; old lady wheeling herself in a wheelchair, smoking; die-hard holding urine sack, blood sack, smoking.'
How should we react when people fall? By Sunita Soliar
'Last Halloween, a woman was thrown out of a fourth-floor window in Marylebone. I was heading back to my flat on Chiltern Street with the intention of watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film that I had always avoided.'
Rachel Lichtenstein on the hidden lives of Hatton Garden
'It is a secret, private, hidden world that operates under a strict set of unspoken internal laws: never screw a partner and once a deal is done it is a 'mazen brucha' and it must be adhered to.'
