Happy 100th Birthday, Granta!
Just bent down, ran my hand along the lower bookshelf and picked out an old copy of Granta. Actually, it's number 26, Travel. Bruce Chatwin is writing about being "On the Road with Mrs Gandhi" and Colin Thubron is marching along "The Old Silk Road", while Timothy Garton Ash is keeping his "Warsaw Notebook". AIDS would take Chatwin, Sikh assassins would murder Gandhi and the Warsaw Pact would be tossed into the dustbin of history. But some things remain the same. Hans Magnus Enzensberger describes, lovingly, "The Extravagance of the Italians" and each paragraph is poetry. Writing about power in Italy, he observes that "It's the most widely used aphrodisiac. In the word potenza the political significance merges with the sexual. A famous Sicilian saying expresses this duality with matchless precision: 'Commandare e meglio di fottere' (Ruling is better than fucking)."
Now Granta is 100 issues old. Novelist William Boyd edits the special centenary number with contributions from Hanif Kureishi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Martin Amis, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Lavinia Greenlaw, Ingo Schulze and Julian Barnes, to name but a few. The beautiful cover, by the way, was done by David Hockney. Happy 100th Birthday, Granta!
