26 Quotes by Giles Foden

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

In Kenya, crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either.

My father was an agricultural economist. In 1989 he was posted to Mbarara, a small town on the Uganda-Rwanda border.

My father worked in agriculture, and I got to travel round remote rural areas with him and see a bit of the landscape and people.

Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.

At school, I got into the whole CB thing, hiding a transceiver in my study-bedroom with which I'd make appointments to meet girls in town. I wasn't good enough at physics to take it much further than fun, but I suppose there was a need to communicate.

I can't think of a specific meal, but my favourite country for food has got to be France. I love those restaurants in the middle of the village squares.