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News Publications About

In the City of Words
‘These are exceptionally interesting pieces, as fresh and illuminating as when they first appeared. Factual, rooted in event and experience, yet they read like beautiful short stories.’
Ian Buruma
‘John Ryle’s writing is compulsively readable: timeless reportage on an eclectic span of issues, erudite and prescient, full of surprising facts and observations.’
Lindsey Hilsum
‘John Ryle’s voice stays in the mind, informed by the uncommon events he has witnessed, the places he has travelled and people he has met, and his own deep reading. To explore these wonderfully written pieces is an illuminating experience.’
Darryl Pinckney
Reportage / Commentary

In the City of Words

Dispatches from the late 20th century
John Ryle
377 Pages
ISBN 978-1-9160783-0-7
Forthcoming 2027

Before City of Words became a publishing house it was a weekly column in the Guardian newspaper, combining global reportage with wide-ranging analysis and commentary.

In the City of Words: Dispatches from the late 20th century brings together a hundred of the columns, vignettes of the world on the eve of the third millennium – some topical and some timeless, some serious and some droll.

‘In the latter days of print,’ John Ryle writes in the introduction, ‘it was often said that newspapers had too many commentators. Today, in the digital universe there are many more. Those who bemoan this are likely commentators themselves. That is to say, we are hypocrites.’

‘Nevertheless,’ he writes, ‘it is true. There is too much opinion, designed to distract rather than inform, too much abject endorsement of consumerism and celebrity culture, too much falsehood and spin – too much of nothing.’

‘What there can never be enough of is honest, accurate, responsible, detailed, diligent, shrewd, historically-informed, fact-based, impartial, fearless, independent, responsibly edited, first-hand news reporting. This kind of journalism, once a source of pride for those working in a flawed profession, is becoming, like the great apes, an endangered species.’

About the author
John Ryle is cofounder of the Rift Valley Institute, coauthor of Peace Is the Name of Our Cattle Camp, and coeditor of The Sudan Handbook. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker and the London Review of Books. He lives in London and teaches at Bard College in New York State.