Цитаты из книги The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination — стр. 4

No real person becomes fictitious by appearing on television, not even by being a television personality more than anything else, but television probably contaminates everything it touches with unreality, and the nature of an historic event alters in some way when it is broadcast on television, because television distorts…

In the middle of March 2008, I read that according to a poll published in the United Kingdom almost a quarter of Britons thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character.

Suárez was not a good Prime Minister during his last years in power, when democracy seemed to begin to establish itself in Spain, but maybe he was the best Prime Minister to confront a coup d’état, because no other Spanish politician of the time knew better than he did how to conduct himself in extreme circumstances or…

Outside Spain the situation is no more favourable for the Prime Minister; it was, but it isn’t any more, among other reasons because since he came to power Suárez has done the opposite of what the world has done: while he was trying desperately to shift to the left, the world calmly shifted to the right.

The exhortations for a coup have been constant since the beginning of democracy, but since the summer of 1980 they are no longer sibylline: the 7 August issue of the weekly Heraldo Español had an enormous white horse rearing up on the cover and a full-page headline demanding: ‘who will mount this horse? wanted: a…

Borges says that ‘every destiny, however long and complicated, essentially boils down to a single moment – the moment a man knows, once and for all, who he is’. Seeing Adolfo Suárez on that 23 February sitting still while the bullets whizzed around him in the deserted chamber, I wondered whether in that moment Suárez had…

...no one at the university where I studied – not at mine or any other university – made the slightest gesture of opposing the coup; no one in the city where I lived – not mine or any other city – took to the streets to confront the rebellious Army officers: except for a handful of people who showed themselves ready to…

There is no novelist who hasn’t felt at least once the presumptuous feeling that reality is demanding a novel of him, that he’s not the one looking for a novel, but that a novel is looking for him.