Editors

"It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea."

"He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to."

"There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore."

"History is always lying before you, unnoticed: till you suddenly see it, as we do now."

"I love churches in Bombay...they make me think of shadow. Of footfall on stone. In England, churches preside over their habitat till they're gratuitous."

"It does like writers, but it's also Calcutta now, not the Calcutta of 25 or 30 or 100 years ago. They maybe haven't got over the idea of it, but the reality, the context that produced that, has disappeared."

"Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee’s voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe."

"So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (...) There are no real European political parties (...). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story."

"Japanese exporters are organized in export cartels by the State. The State restricts competition among exporters and importers. The same thing is done in Germany and Italy. Moreover, it is not only in totalitarian States that payments for imported goods have become dependent on governmental decisions."

"A foreign visitor to the Berlin Stock Exchange would easily be deceived. There are announcements of daily quotations and price changes as though a free Stock Exchanged still existed, but nowhere would he find the former ‘public’— private buyers and sellers—as represented by independent brokers, bankers and ‘visitors.’"

"The larger the big corporations grow and the closer they become connected with the State bureaucracy, the fewer changes there are for the rise of new competitors."

"Fritz Nonnenbruch, the financial editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, states: ‘There exists no law which binds the State. The state can do what it regards as necessary, because it has the authority…. The next stage of National-Socialist economic policy consists of replacing capitalist laws by policy.’"

"The existence of a state within the State—the Party and the bureaucracy—is a phenomenon of the post-War world."

"Whereas in democratic countries the businessman may use his money to influence legislation and public opinion and thus operated as a source of power and corruption, in fascist countries he can exist only as the subject upon whom State power operates. The corruption in fascist arises inevitably from the reversal of the role of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power."

"The totalitarian State does not tolerate any ‘second government,’ any challenge to the power of the all-wise dictator. [As the Nazi party has stated] ‘Within the constitution of the Third Reich any position independent of the will of the Fuehrer no longer exists. The principle of separation of power is a thing of the past. Only the Party has a privileged position.’"

"The old type of capitalist who adheres to the traditional concepts of property rights is doomed to failure under fascism."

"The slightest formal mistake was punishable with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error. Obviously, the [Nazi] examination of the books was simply a pretext for partial expropriation of the private capitalist with a view to complete expropriation and seizure of the desired property later."

"[F]ascism is a new brand of feudalism in which the private capitalist has become merely a tool of the State—where absolute power has entirely taken the place of money power."

"In others cases, National Socialist officials were levying harsh fines of millions of marks for a “single bookkeeping error.”"

"I must confess that I think as most German businessmen do who today fear National Socialism as much as they did Communism in 1932. But there is a distinction. In 1932, the fear of Communism was a phantom; today National Socialism is a terrible reality. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews' (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated… The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen."

"You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. . . In this respect they certainly differ from the former Social-Democratic officials. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system."

"While State representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped, because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur’ followed by a prison sentence."

"Of all businessmen the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the Party. The Party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or just around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Heer Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these man as ‘enemies of the State’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota or scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business license."

"You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain about it. The new State loans are nothing but confiscation of private property, because no one believes that the Government will ever make repayment, not even pay interest after the first few years."

"In truth, modern life requires many people of talent and intelligence to run big institutions, including governments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it as oppressive. Then Donald Trump came before them and sneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence.... To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In the future, this strategy may well be called Trumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism."

"Isolationism as a stream of thought was hibernating. It was rarely articulated, but passionately held, waiting for someone like Trump to lead it. Isolationists were called the “silent majority” in Richard Nixon’s days — even though Nixon was an internationalist, who built a strong relationship with China. Trump knew how to exploit the silent majority’s mix of racism, grievances and xenophobia. He appealed to the vast national community of chronic blamers, anxious to locate the cause of American problems in China, thereby executing a double play of racism and xenophobia."

"His rise to the status of Republican presidential candidate will stand as a unique historic achievement."

"By winning his party’s nomination, Trump has rewritten the rules. Until this year, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in American national politics. Trump has carelessly, perhaps jubilantly, maligned Mexicans and Muslims. ... His success results from sheer intuition. He realized, as others did not, that there are many thousands of people ready to vote for a candidate preaching anti-Mexican, anti-Muslin bigotry, while also blaming America’s failures on the Chinese and on free trade."

"There is a difference in printing greater depth to any portion with the negative and shading down without the negative. In the former case we get a deeper and stronger image, still preserving to a great extent the relative contrasts between the lights and shades in that portion. This is not always what we require. In order to concentrate attention upon that is, to emphasize, some particular spot, it may be desirable to shade down and flatten some portion."

"Both with the negative in position and subsequently without it, every part of a large print is, maybe, thus printed in, piece by piece, a large print often occupying me two or three days."

"The texture of the printed image is of such peculiar character that neither brush or liquid paint seem capable of imitating it."

"...let it be remembered that as photography is our chosen medium, then if photography unaided will give us the effect we want there is no especial virtue in altering it."

"Probably every photographer has at times found it convenient to print one part of a negative more than another or lias covered another portion during printing, thus deliberately making those portions lighter or darker, as the case may be."

"He (the photographer) has practically created a new thing out of materials gathered from nature; upon a foundation of fact he has allowed his imagination to build up an entirely fictitious scene, and the truth of the effect will depend upon how far his perceptions have been trained by studying nature at various times, so as to know how things might look under certain circumstances."

"The moment the eye perceives that the picture is produced by other than the professed means, the effect, the appeal to the imagination, is disturbed."

"In such a picture the artist may depart from actual fact, from what actually was, so long as he does not exceed what might have been."

"But the quality of the result obtained by using a pin-hole to which its advocates attach most importance is the suppression of sharp focus over the whole image, no one plane being more sharply focused than another."

"The objection to the shiny, highly polished surface of albumen and gelatine papers is that, besides the fact that the surface reflects false and disturbing lights, the very polish and gloss has an artificial appearance which, from its very superfine character, irresistibly reminds us of its origin and nature."

"We are then brought to consider Platinotype, which, on the whole, may be regarded as the most suitable for general pictorial work. Its power of rendering relative tones and atmosphere is perhaps unequalled, whilst, although every one who has used it has sometimes wished that the undeveloped image were more visible, yet the pale, ghost-like print made by the light is very much better than nothing at all, and, indeed, may often be quite sufficient to guide us in our endeavours to control the action of light in a manner to be shortly described."

"It is often difficult and well-nigh impossible, when using the lens, to get all planes in moderate focus without getting one or some part excessively so, and similarly, if we avoid excessive sharpness in each and every part, some planes, such as the extreme distance or immediate foreground, so broken up as to destroy form and structure. Then it is that the pin-hole, with its equal focus in all planes and at any focal length, seems to recommend itself; but if it be desired to emphasize any object, by introducing more detail there than elsewhere, then the uniform sharpness of the pin-hole image fails us."

"…the strongest part of a picture is the sensation and the feeling which it creates, this being done through the agency of certain familiar objects more or less accurately depicted and represented with more or less completeness. The MOTIVE, then, in all pictorial work is to convey some thought or idea or sensation by means of a chosen subject."

"As a rule, in pictorial photography a long-focus lens will on the whole be most satisfactory."

"Art seeks ever to conceal the means by which its effects are produced and the method in which the work is wrought."

"The chief characteristic of the pin-hole photograph is that we get a general suppression of focus in all parts the picture is nowhere quite sharp."

"Inferior as a mechanical printing method for ordinary photographic purposes, the gum process may for a time at least be regarded as standing apart for pictorial purposes, because the large amount of personal control which must be exercised before it can be said to show distinct advantages over other methods implies that the controlling hand must be guided by an artist that is, a man of such large instinctive artistic taste that one can hardly conceive that he would be able to produce a better result by painting, and without the use of photography at all, were he to devote the same skill and endeavour to the employment of brush or pencil, instead of photographic appliances."

"The louder a sound is, the more we recognize it as being near, so the louder the "tone" of objects that is, the blacker or whiter the nearer they seem; and so if in our picture we wish to give a sense of distance, we must see that the darkest shadows and highest lights are in the foreground : and because we may not be able to materially alter things as the undiscriminating process gives them to us, we must seek for and select those scenes, those subjects, in which this arrangement of highest and deepest tones do come in the foreground, and then take care that our process renders them with fidelity, so that we may not lose the sense of their nearness or the feeling of greater distance of other planes which it is intended they shall give."

"It must be remembered that after all in making a picture we are endeavoring to set down on one plane various objects in such a way as to suggest an infinitude of varying planes, and hence we are justified in selecting such conditions of nature as shall help us to give the impression of truthfulness, even though it be not in particular cases absolutely true to fact."

"...strictly speaking, tone is the relative lightness and darkness due to the effect of light governed by atmosphere, and has nothing to do with the relative lightness and darkness or relative value with which various colours appear when compared with each other."

"Very great care should then be taken to see that distant objects are rendered so as to appear distant that is, in correct relative tone when compared with the foreground or nearer portions."

"… to put it into slightly different form, it is not the facts in nature that the good picture aims at portraying, but the effects of light and shade accompanied by a pleasing arrangement."