John Bryson

A novella sized piece covering the Ulster troubles, called the Stormont Riots, the street battles and intrigues of Ulster Protestants and IRA.<br /> <br />&quot;John Bryson has the skills of literary journalism, and abundant luck&quot; a Penguin Books copywriter wrote for a back cover, and this was the case in 1986 in Belfast, where I was to launch a book, and stayed on to cover the sectarian war of that year, the worst for many years.<br /> <br />&apos;A man was...

A World This Size. You will have a restaurant like this in your city. And, if you have spent time eating alone in restaurants, you will have felt the reverie of the imagination, which will cause you to scrutinise other diners for clues to their personalities and attribute to them lives you could find interesting. This is the story here. A little Baroque music struts overhead. Here a man sits by himself. He is waiting on a martini. His fingers drum the cloth. Soon he falls to searching faces at...

Five Asian pieces, four from Kalimantan, Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and one column piece from Samarinda, in one volume.<br /> <br />1. His Brow in Feathers, the Dyak Chieftain and his Equation for the Order of Time.<br />A Festival of Redemption, led by the Chief of the People Benuaq, Dyaks of the Central Lakes, Borneo.<br /> <br />His lake was once a mountain, which inverted its form in an act of compassion for people who were without fishing grounds. The people...

Brilliant Artists in Trio<br /> <br />A volume of three feature pieces.<br /> <br />1. Janet Baker, the Wind in Her Hair.<br />Opera&apos;s Dame Janet, now retired from the stage to song performance, takes to sea on a yacht, the better to understand the rhythms of Elgar&apos;s Sea Pictures, of which she is already the world&apos;s authority.<br /> <br />She was playing with the sound of the waves from the bow, it seemed to me, &quot;Never before...

Here is Brodie, an expatriate trader in New Guinea, whose understanding of the sorceries and rituals he now lives with is moving close to respect and wonderment. He watches his visiting daughter, a twelve year old, being captivated by this culture of theatre.<br /> <br />The place was packed. Tiptoe, over the matt-black heads of the crowd, he could see the performers. He edged closer, but so rapt was everyone that none of them looked around. The figure who held their attention was...

A volume, four stories of Enric, his boyhood as a child undercover agent in the Spanish Resistance to Fascist rule after the Civil War. Fiction based on the true life of Enric Torres, narrator in the novel To the Death, Amic<br /> <br />Hospice<br />Enric, the boy of To the Death, Amic works as a smuggler for The Organisation, the resistance movement in Barcelona. From France, over the high country, he brings in ammunition, leaflets. This time his job is to smuggle a young...

In Rage, Rebellion – A volume comprising three feature pieces:<br /> <br />1. Backstage at the Revolution<br />While the African National Congress was a banned organization in South Africa, and the white minority ruled with gunfire, the ANC theatre troupe Amandla toured the world. Amandla is Power. Every performer is a trained soldier and musician, dancer. Here is their tour of Australia.<br />Beginning in darkness, the Overture is unlike any music theatergoers have heard...

Islanders, Far South – Three feature pieces and one column piece in one volume, events in the lives of southern fishing communities in Tasmania.<br /> <br />1.Pride of the Crayfish Fleet.<br />Life in the Bass Strait Islands, out of the Port of Lady Barron.<br /> <br />THE CRAYFISH I HOLD in my hand is forty years old. By whatever system of temporal measurement crayfish use, it is a very old man. In a few weeks its tail will be sliced into the white discs...

Stories of Laughter and Lament, set among the filthy rich and the dirt poor, seven stories first selected and published by Penguin Books.<br /> <br />Widows<br />Charles Rand fell off his yacht, somewhere in the middle of the bay, on one of the first pale blue evenings of autumn. Later, the Coroner would be unable to fix that time more precisely than between six and ten o&apos;clock. Newspapers, reporting that he had sailed off without crew, used terms which pictured Charles as...

The Personality of War – A volume comprising five pieces.<br /> <br />Dresden.<br />Now an old man, a onetime Air Force flyer recalls his time in the night sky during the bombing of Dresden.<br />For the incineration of a hundred and forty thousand souls, if things went right, for the destruction of a graceful city, of its old walls and obedient gardens, they flew east. He was the navigator.<br /> <br />Rehearsals for the Death of Taipei.<br />One day...

Three Revolutions in the Equatorial Americas.<br /> <br />A volume of three feature pieces treating revolutions in each of Panama, Nicaragua and the building of tensions in Haiti.<br /> <br />1. In Panama, a Pantomime.<br />Billed as support for a rebellion against General Noriega, the US invaded Panama for Christmas 1989. A year later Western expatriates in their clubs and enclaves were still divided.<br /> <br />GENERAL NORIEGA&apos;S portrait stood on...

A novel written true to the histories, and true to the memories of Enric Torres i Barbo, whose life and philosophies this novel takes for its guide.<br /> <br />Twin boys Enric and Josep, at ten years of age, served as spies and couriers in the Resistance by the Republican Spanish against the invasion of Fascist forces in Spain, then from Italy and Germany during the Civil War.<br /> <br />In Catalonia the war begins in Barcelona.<br /> <br />THE MAZE of...

Whoring Around, a novella in six stories.<br /> <br />Prologue<br />Blowing It<br />Between Whores<br />Dreaming of Glory<br />A Sense of Propriety<br /> <br />More and more we lunched at his tennis club. He had recently become its honorary treasurer. I remember an afternoon, with the washed blues and faint yellows of early winter, when we ate on the terrace. The stonework was damp where the sun had not touched it. The other tables were empty, so...