Manny > Books: strongly-recommended (76) ×

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The Woman and the Wine-Jar

A woman is walking along one day when she finds an empty wine-jar. She picks it up and sniffs it appreciatively.

"Ah!" she sighs. "What you must have been in your prime, when the very dregs of you are so lovely!"

The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book show, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding area, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control.

During the Second World War, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children.

We had good jokes too. Here's one. An American robot is on the roof of the reactor for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Russian robot's been up on the roof for two hours! Then someone shouts over the loudspeaker: "Private Ivanov! Two hours more, and you can take a cigarette break!"

There's a moment in Ales Adamovich's book, when he's talking to Andrei Sakharov. "Do you know," says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, "how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?"

I was First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party. I said absolutely not. "What will people think if I take my daughter with her baby out of here? Their children have to stay." Those people who tried to leave, to save their own skins, I'd call them into the regional committee. "Are you a Communist or not?" It was a test for people. If I'm a criminal, then why was I killing my own grandchild?" [Goes on for some time but it is impossible to understand what he is saying]

Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping it would be made of good meat. Then we found that it was the expensive salami that they mixed the contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it.

When we buried him, I covered his face with two handkerchiefs. If someone asked me to, I lifted them up. One woman fainted. And she used to be in love with him, I was jealous of her once. "Let me look at him one last time." "All right."

My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything.

These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unseen. I felt like I was recording the future.

One in Louisiana, one who travels around
One of them mainly stays in heart-throb town
I am not their main concern, they are lonely too
I am just an arrow passing through

One of them's got a little boy, other one he's got two
one of them's wife is one week overdue

I know these girls they don't like me, but I am just like them
picking a crazy apple off a stem

Reading this book was like meeting someone, falling madly in love, and finding out she's got a terminal illness, all in the space of twenty minutes.

He just bores me stiff

I desperately need my fella to lighten up.

I want us to buy a flat and start a family, but he's too interested in interest rates and booming world population to commit.

He says we shouldn't have children because we don't know what the world will be like in 20 years.

He's also obsessed with climate change and the environment.

It bores me rigid. I tend to live one day at a time and deal with each problem that presents itself. How can I persuade him to do the same?

Families face nuclear tax on power bills

Industry promised subsidy if market price fails to encourage new plants

Government officials have drawn up secret plans to tax electricity consumers to subsidise the construction of the UK's first new nuclear reactors for more than 20 years, the Guardian has learned.

The planned levy on household bills would add £44 to an annual electricity bill of £500 and contradicts repeated promises by ministers that the nuclear industry would no longer benefit from public subsidies. There is mounting pressure on the power industry to show it can keep the lights on, with fears growing of an energy gap as ageing nuclear stations are retired and plans for new coal plants attract hostile protests.

Ed Miliband to unveil plans to fast-track new nuclear power stations

Government will identify sites around Britain suitable for building nuclear plants as part of new energy policy

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, insisted today that nuclear power had a "relatively good" safety record in this country as he prepared to unveil plans to fast-track a new generation of nuclear power stations.

If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture. It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that given to the plants in countries anciently civilised.

Bien souvent, des Esseintes avait médité sur cet inquiétant problème, écrire un roman concentré en quelques phrases qui contiendraient le suc cohobé des centaines de pages toujours employées à établer le milieu, à dessiner les caractères, à entasser à l'appui les observations et les menus faits. Alors les mots choisis seraient tellment impermutables qu'ils suppléeraient à tous les autres : l'adjective posé d'une si définitive façon qu'il ne pourrait être légalement dépossédé de sa place, ouvrirait de telles perspectives que le lecteur pourrait rêver, pendant des semaines entières, sur son sens, tout à la fois précis et multiple, constaterait le présent, reconstruirait le passé, devinerait l'avenir d'âmes des personnages, révélés par les lueurs de cette épithète unique.

Från mjölkbutiken, klockan fem
Ett litet mumintroll gick hem
En kanna full med mjölk han bar
Och vägen lång och kuslig var
Och vinden suckade och ven
I skogens alla mörka trän
Det var ej långt från skymningen
Vad tror du att det hände sen?

The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason