Цитаты из книг — Kaliane Bradley

My England wasn’t like this, he’d told me—but this was the natural evolution of his England. I was the natural evolution. I was his lens if he would only raise me and look with me.

The expats were envisioned as either foreign bodies against which the universe might launch an immune attack, or cells that could be recognized and incorporated by the “systems” into the body of the world. We used, once again, the word “assimilation,” but instead of survival we meant a sort of sublimation, a permeable…

I had never owned a bike that was not secondhand and coming apart. Brakes were more of an ideological pursuit than a mechanism. So I bought a brand-new bike, cycled it home from the shop, and wheeled it into the kitchen. He was at the table, staring glumly at his cigarettes. A half-filled spatial reasoning test was open…

He was, however, enamored of the concept of endless music, disseminated into any room. It was how he started to learn to type, carefully pecking in the names of symphonies and taking a full minute to find the letter “M.” He said that, in his own time, he had hunted and drilled and drawn up watches to a fragmented gurgle…

The expats, loose as dust in narrative time, were schooled mercilessly in description. According to the hypothesis, the more accurate their vocabulary, the more likely they would temporally adjust. “Assimilate” is actually the word we used—they would assimilate if they said “phone” instead of “unholy device” or “car”…

He didn’t like twenty-first-century language. “Victorian” was his greatest descriptive enemy, and to be fair, I’d heard people apply the word miscellaneously to any period 1710–1916. But much of what I thought of as quintessentially “Victorian” was in his future and, to him, gargantuan, disproportionate, ungentlemanly,…

“I hope you do not mind me making this observation,” he said. “But I think I am right in saying you are not, yourself, wholly an Englishwoman.” “Well done,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “What gave it away? Shape of my eyes?” “The color of your mouth.” The ice hit the bottom of my glass with a frigid knock. I’d never…

Gore came from an era of service à la française, private dining rooms and putting everything into jelly. When I began to explain, in tones of motherly patience, how twenty-first century restaurants operated, he said, “I’ve eaten kangaroo on the uninhabited shores of the Albert River. I understand how a knife and fork…

The ice outside shifts—the Arctic stammering its jaws as a cat does when it sees a bird. The ship’s cat died in convulsions during their second winter. Gore had liked that cat. He’d become quite attached to it, especially as his dog had died in the first spring.

“I should warn you that these days, blowing up an Arabian port because you want to claim it for the empire is generally frowned upon.”

When he returned, he blew in like the weather. His jaw was set, which I had started to understand was a sign of enormous agitation. “This city is so crowded,” he said, standing in the hallway in his coat and boots. “Worse even than when I was last here. There are buildings everywhere. No horizons. Only buildings and…

“I thought so. Well, well. You have done something interesting with your enslaved lightning. It must be flying very fast.” “Yes. A flight from London to New York takes eight hours.” He coughed suddenly, bringing up a mouthful of smoke. “Uh—I want you to stop telling me things for a moment, please,” he said. “That’s… quite…

This is everything I remember about my earliest hours with him. We separated and spent the fading day bobbing shyly around each other like clots in a lava lamp. I was expecting him to have a time-travel-induced psychotic break and perhaps chew or fold me with murderous intent. Mostly he touched things, with a compulsive…

In order to avoid the chaos inherent in changing the course of history—if “history” could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crock of shit—it was agreed that it would be necessary to extract people from historical war zones, natural disasters, and epidemics. These expatriates to the…

They are supposed to be dead. As long as they’re here, it’s functionally as if they are dead in their own time. Again, I must emphasize, you are focused on the long-term prognoses of the expats in our era.

We’d been briefed on teaching moments, where we might find the values of the expats didn’t align with those of modern, multicultural Britain. For Gore, Control had identified the conquest of Aden and the Second Opium War. Avoid confrontational or oppositional language. Avoid being drawn into conversations about personal…

He left and didn’t return for several hours. The air turned sharp and cool. Oily clouds were piling up in the sky. A storm was coming. I was fretful and couldn’t stay in one room for longer than a few minutes. It had occurred to me only after he shut the door that I wasn’t allowed to let him out of my sight yet. When he…

“I’m cleared to top secret and I’ve worked with—displaced people. The Ministry’s original intention was to have the expats cohabiting with therapists, but in the end they felt it made more sense for you to have… a friend.”