Nomads survive because they have an "irreverent and timeless vitality," Mr. Chatwin wrote of human wanderers.
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, he wrote "Of Human Freedom," attacking absolutism and tracing the intellectual origins of democracy.
By Michelle Nijhuis May 15, 2014 In the nineteen-thirties, the literary theorist Kenneth Burke proposed what he called the "comic frame" — the view, he wrote, of "human antics as a comedy, albeit as a comedy ever on the verge of the most disastrous tragedy".
The strength of Olson's book is how well she writes of the human element in politics and diplomacy.
"They seemed," he writes of the human morass at Calcutta's Sealdah station, "a lifeless component of this dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky".
From South Africa to Bosnia, Rwanda to Latin America, he writes of the human cost of repression, war and mass murder.Then he asks a difficult question: how can justice best be done?
The examples you write of other human functions cannot compare with smoking.
He also wrote of the human life that obstinately and at times radiantly asserted itself in a place of death.
In his eulogy for John Osborne, David Hare wrote: "Of all human freedoms the most contentious is the freedom not to fear what people will think of you".
As one observer wrote: "Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor General of British India.
