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“... I’m looking at you, grandma the way you’re sitting in stiff lace in a long skirt in front of the cottage in Rakocice the date under the photograph 1913. You still don’t know what I’ve known a long time that in a year it all breaks loose the armies roll, but for now it’s quiet here few people I hear only girl calling girl ‘the one in the Austrian uniform is the very picture of Bogdan ...”

“... I would like to tell the story of the time lived through after the night when Stanleyville learned that Lumumba had been murdered, and that he had died in bestial circumstances, in a way that trampled all dignity. Someone’s penetrating shout woke us up in the morning. We jumped out of bed – I was sleeping with Duszan in one room, and Jardawas next door – and dashed to the window ...”

“... the Washington Post, Andrew Buckoke for the Financial Times and others. The third is by a writer, Ryszard Kapuściński, who spent many years masquerading as a correspondent for the Polish news agency, PAP. In covering epic misfortune of the kind one reads about in Africa, all three have learned to talk straight from the shoulder, although Buckoke’s is ...”

“... most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them. Although Ryszard Kapuściński has earned his living as a journalist and writes in prose, and although we have to read him in translation, he is, in the soaring, pithy power of his best work, a poet. His finest verses are his four books, all but one of them ...”

“... as areas of darkness, where coups and crises are glimpsed but may remain inscrutable. Another is Ryszard Kapuściński, an expert in what his new book calls ‘confusion’, who has attended 27 revolutions in the Third World. These revolutions, he believably reports, have been confusions. There he sat in his writer’s hotel room, venturing out into a ...”

“... prefer not to see their file at all. My view is different. ‘People’s Poland’ was the land Ryszard Kapuściński lived in, but left as often as he could. Many men and women there who despised the regime made bargains with themselves: if the price of getting a passport to a conference in Paris, or of befriending a Western foreigner, was to visit a ...”

“... Ryszard Kapuściński’s is the most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the collapse of the Soviet empire that I have read. Caustic and lyrical by turns, it is driven by that combustible mixture of love and loathing for their neighbour which Poles seem to have felt since the days of Mickiewicz ...”

“... formally committed to the doctrine that revolutions are the inevitable concomitants of Progress, Ryszard Kapuściński is unusually qualified to provide us with an answer. He understands – as few Western writers can – how a regime can be based largely if not exclusively on terror; and that since the instruments of terror are primarily ...”

“... in 1974 large numbers of Portuguese migrants hastily departed, their flight memorably described by Ryszard Kapuściński in Another Day of Life. The migrants, and the whole infrastructure of Portuguese Africa, were dependent on forced labour in parts of Angola that most colonists never saw. As for Cadbury’s, they started to buy their cocoa from the ...”

“... of the known world’. Zanzibar was an important point on the route; in The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard Kapuściński stresses the fact that a number of the great travellers – ‘Livingstone and Stanley, Burton and Speke, Cameron and Thomson’ – sent their telegraphs from the island. Kapuściński admires the ...”

“... have some appeal, after all. A similar, though more sinister, regal shortsightedness is evident in Ryszard Kapuściński’s fascinating account of Haile Selassie’s downfall, made up of ostensibly verbatim conversations with palace officials and minor politicians, all of whom had access to the decrepit little emperor during his final months of ...”

“... bolster the cause of peace, frightening potential subversives). Lost City Radio demonstrates what Ryszard Kapuściński (an influence on Alarcón) referred to as war’s ‘incommunicability’. In war, philosophy can kill. ‘I was cold and angry,’ the narrator says in ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979’: ‘Hurt by too many German philosophers in ...”

“... a very good question. Significant attempts to fictionalise the period have so far been oblique. Ryszard Kapuściński included imaginary scenes from Lumumba’s life in a grimly humorous account of his own incarceration and near-execution by Belgian paratroopers in The Soccer War. V.S. Naipaul’s magnificent A Bend in the River looked at a slightly ...”

“... very much further in the thirty years that followed the Emperor’s restoration in 1941, and, as Ryszard Kapuściński illustrates so vividly in his book of interviews with courtiers of the overthrown ruler. The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, the vocabulary of development and progress, which was the vocabulary of the court, came less and less to ...”

“... of apples in his fridge, and a few suits hanging in the wardrobe. It’s the kind of detail that Ryszard Kapuściński might have included, and have then been accused of making up. In Osman’s hands, it has the ring of truth. Kuche-ye ma effectively ends at the close of the Cold War, when Afghanistan ceases to matter to Russia and the United ...”