Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Rabanis a British travel writer and novelist. He has received several awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and a 1997 Washington State Governor's Writer's Award. Since 1990 he has lived with his daughter in Seattle...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth14 June 1942
distance reality scary
Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.
real sea rivers
The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty pool, then ran on through water meadows over graveled shallows into Fakenham [England], where it slowed and deepened, gathering strength for the long drifts across muddy flatlands to Norwich and the North Sea.
art real men
Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.
front holy home
My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front
bank country giant hand living nation swiss tempted
The only nation I've ever been tempted to feel really racist about are the Swiss - a whole country of phobic hand washers living in a giant Barclays Bank
audience dreams feels known leaders mind obama perhaps political private reveals sentence shows time until
'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.
white house president
Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.
prayer lessons
Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.
presidential bars prose
Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.
president
No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.
political mountain east
The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.
taken cities gone
By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in Seattle... Seattle was the coming place. So I joined the line of hopefuls.
art thinking soul
Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.
cities southern borders
Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound.