Shocks, loss and a desperate wish to have been somewhere else at moments of disaster are the themes of this strong issue of a magazine which continues to offer a lively mix of reportage, travel and new fiction. There is a piece on Princess Diana's surreal death which has already assumed the mythic "where were you? " status of JFK's assassination. As expected, the very unEnglish orgy of public grief receives an unemotional treatment from Ian Jack and his jaundiced panel of interviewees, which includes a young music student whose parents had died in a car accident some months before Diana.
Recalling a friend who sent £50 worth of flowers to the palace, she says: "She didn't buy any for me when my parents died." Even stronger is Linda Grant's harrowingly candid account of her mother's disintergrating memory. E.B.