"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

"Thanks," he said. It would be better this way, actually. He didn't feel
like talking.
So he packed his backpack, including camping gear with the clothes, and
the next morning flew to London. It was strange how one traveled these
days: he got into a moving chamber outside his hotel, then shifted from
one chamber to the next for several hours, only stepping outdoors again
when he emerged from the Camden tube station, some hundred yards from
Charles and Rya's flat.
The ghost of his old pleasure brushed him as he crossed Camden High Street
and walked by the cinema, listening to London's voices. This had been his
method for years: come to London, stay with Charles and Rya until he found
digs, do his research and writing at the British Museum, visit the used
bookstores at Charing Cross, spend the evenings at Charles and Rya's,
watching TV and talking. It had been that way for four books, over the
course of twenty years.
The flat was located above a butcher shop. Every wall in it was covered
with stuffed bookshelves, and there were shelves nailed up over the
toilet, the bath, and the head of the guest bed. In the unlikely event of
an earthquake the guest would be buried in a hundred histories of London.
Frank threw his pack on the guest bed and went past the English poets
downstairs. The living room was nearly filled by a table stacked with
papers and books. The side street below was an open-air produce market,
and he could hear the voices of the vendors as they packed up for the day.
The sun hadn't set, though it was past nine; these late May days were
already long. It was almost like still being in therapy.
He went downstairs and bought vegetables and rice, then went back up and
cooked them. The kitchen windows were the color of sunset, and the little
flat glowed, evoking its owners so strongly that it was almost as if they
were there. Suddenly he wished they were.
After eating he turned on the CD player and put on some Handel. He opened
the living room drapes and settled into Charles's armchair, a glass of
Bulgarian wine in his hand, an open notebook on his knee. He watched
salmon light leak out of the clouds to the north, and tried to think about
the causes of the First World War.

In the morning he woke to the dull thump thump thump of frozen slabs of
meat being rendered by an axe. He went downstairs and ate cereal while
leafing through the Guardian, then took the tube to Tottenham Court Road
and walked to the British Museum.
Because of The Belle Epoque he had already done his research on the
pre-war period, but writing in the British Library was a ritual he didn't
want to break; it made him part of a tradition, back to Marx and beyond.
He showed his still-valid reader's ticket to a librarian and then found an
empty seat in his usual row; in fact he had written much of Entre Deux
Guerres in that very carrel, under the frontal lobes of the great skull
dome. He opened a notebook and stared at the page. Slowly he wrote, 1900
to 1914. Then he stared at the page.
His earlier book had tended to focus on the sumptuous excesses of the
pre-war European ruling class, as a young and clearly leftist reviewer in
the Guardian had rather sharply pointed out. To the extent that he had