Leslie Wilson

Leslie Wilson’s most recent book is Last Train from Kummersdorf. She lives in Berkshire.

Diary: Talking Rubbish

Leslie Wilson, 19 August 1993

There is a school-trip atmosphere about this party of waste-disposal professionals off to the rubbish dump: the packets of sandwiches handed out beforehand; everyone piling onto the coach in the heat and waiting for hours, talking shop, talking rubbish. Mainly men, though there is a scattering of women. The occasion: an international symposium on waste disposal at Bosphorus University, Istanbul. This has got to be the Cinderella end of environmentalism, less cuddly than dolphins, lacking the apocalyptic quality of the hole in the ozone layer.

Farewell Hong Kong

Penelope Fitzgerald, 24 February 1994

Samuel Pink is brought up in an English country rectory in the 1880s. He knows that the Pinks are not his real father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by...

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Under Witchwood

Adam Thorpe, 10 September 1992

A modern witch is a Witch. The upper case denotes a self-consciousness born of safer times: Witchcraft is now a minority faith to be taken seriously (at least in the States), and there is even a...

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