competed at the 2008 Summer Paralympics
in Beijing
, People's Republic of China
. Great Britain sent a delegation of around 400, of which 212 were athletes, to compete in eighteen sports at the Games. The team was made up of athletes from the whole United Kingdom; athletes from Northern Ireland
, who may elect to hold Irish citizenship
under the pre-1999 article 2 of the Irish constitution
, are able to be selected to represent either Great Britain or Ireland
at the Paralympics. Additionally some British overseas territories
compete separately from Britain in Paralympic competition.
Britain finished second in the medal table, behind host nation China
, winning 42 gold medals and 102 total medals, equalling the team's position in the medal table
at the 2004 Athens Games
.
Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.
The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.
Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.
Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.
How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.
She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone — a dilemma in one shape or another common to most of mankind.