Best of Quest English 2011

Quest was an intel- lectual rite of passage: many of the boldface names that light up newspapers, magazines, academic journals and even television screens today, first made their mark with a piece in here. The Best of Quest is a collection of some of the most striking essays, poems and stories to have appeared in the pages of the magazine. In an era not long past, Quest was the sign of the times. But such a sign and such a time it was that reading the magazine now is illuminating in an absolutely contem- porary sense. Like its counterparts across the world - Transition in Africa, Encounter in the USA/UK, Quad- rant in Australia, and its fellow publication, Imprint in India - Quest was ideologically free-wheeling and stood for "cultural freedom", a term not free of complication, given the dirty tricks of the cold war. What endures from that era is this: a testament to a time when writ- ers and readers were renaissance people; a time when independent thought reigned supreme.