Giles Foden
Giles Foden
Giles Fodenis an English author, best known for his novel The Last King of Scotland...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
people produces tribes
Suffering produces a recursion to the tribe, to one's own kind. When a lot of people suffer, tribes lose their head.
african along bump bush grew love
I grew up in the African bush in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, which is my thing. I love the smell of the dust as you bump along in a Land-Rover. I go back there often.
forgiveness nearest seems
The forgiveness that comes of patient interpretation seems impossible when those nearest to your heart are threatened.
air civil gesture ground hot invest proper unless
You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.
colour definitive lines river time
It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.
add cultural foreign
Foreign students add cultural value to their British peers, who need an international outlook.
childhood electronic particular radio spent tinkering
I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.
crime deeply failure successive
In Kenya, crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either.
posted town
My father was an agricultural economist. In 1989 he was posted to Mbarara, a small town on the Uganda-Rwanda border.
areas bit remote round rural travel worked
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.
corpses define history littered tried
The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.
european poems power realise rival sweep
To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.
further girls good hiding meet physics suppose
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.
country favourite food love middle specific
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.