Destruction is not defeat: it is an opportunity to build anew

Destruction is not defeat it is an opportunity to build anew

1985 5 May 23 Destruction is not defeat: it is an opportunity to build anew (78) The President of Cuba, Fidel Castro, lists American author Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) among his favourite writers. In an interview, he told the Havana paper ‘Granma’ that Hemingway’s books had always been good company to him. For Castro, the struggle of a classic Hemingway hero is like that of the Cuban people since the revolution of 1959. “We have also been vulnerable and exposed to destruction for decades.... Hemingway was right: a man can be destroyed, but never beaten.”

Foresight is a result of intellectual curiosity

1985 5 May 23 Foresight is a result of intellectual curiosity (106) J.L. Garvin was editor of The Observer (London) from 1908 to 1942. Famed as “the most celebrated editorial writer in the world” he owed his influence in no small part to a figt of prescience: his predictions and warnings for the future were repeatedly proved right. David Ayerst writes in his biography “Garvin of the Observer” that his foresight was a result of intellectual curiosity, illustrated by a letter to his son in the trenches in 1915: “Will science ever give distant vision as it now gives distant sound? I think that must come, and wish we were so far.”

(The Guardian Weekly, February 10, 1985)