"A book I read at least once a year. I took American studies as part of my degree, and found Hemingway a little late, but “The Sun Also Rises” is the ultimate of the modernist school. I’m not sure why I read it so often, but much has to do with the huge love affair at the heart of it—and the setting, between the wars, within the world of this lost generation of expats. It just completely transports me from wherever I am to Paris and Pamplona. And his writing has such hidden depths—every time I read it I find something new. It takes a lost soul to convey so much."

"""Among all of Orwell’s great unflinching reportage, this book stands out as a personal odyssey and first-person witness to history. He went to Spain in 1936, during the civil war there, to help fight Fascism. He joined a leftist militia and found himself targeted not only by Franco’s forces but by Stalinists intent on crushing anyone not toeing the Moscow line. Orwell’s descriptions of wartime Barcelona and impoverished rural Spain, his clear-eyed analysis of the shifting factions in the war, are triumphs of tender, hard-headed participant-observation. He was wounded at the front, shot through the throat by a sniper. His peerless moral grasp of the dangers of totalitarianism began in Spain."