Haig's page of fine excerpts
These start from the amusing and end with the serious, but are
all very beautifully written indeed, in my opinion!
A passage from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey that may be of
particular relevance to lady e-mail correspondents!
A particularly delightful excerpt from The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens
Hugo's reply, upon being asked "Listen, who are you, in fact?", in
Vaclav Havel's famous play, "The Garden Party".
Excerpts from a number of the Prague-based,
mutually interwoven stories by
Leo Perutz from his book "By night under the stone bridge",
translated from the German original by Eric Mosbacher
A rather bitter-sweet, at once funny and touching incident drawn from a novel by Gabriel Garci'a Ma'rquez
A well-nigh virtuosic piece of writing by Georges Perec (and, equally, by his translator!)
An exceptionally penetrating, beautiful and passionate passage by the great Italo Calvino - even by his own standards; the
admirable translator is William Weaver
A favourite passage from one of the books of Hermann Hesse
Two particularly fine excerpts from the historical novel "Memoirs
of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar, a book
to which I was introduced by the Japanese composer Atsuko Sato who
invited me to premiere a piece of hers based on the book when we were
both students at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama a couple of
years ago!
A beautiful passage from one of the sermons of John Donne, often used as a prayer
Note that several more outstandingly fine Calvino excerpts may be
found in my links pages.
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