Explore essays and memoir
A Bar on North Avenue
Roger Ebert
‘We regulars knew each other. We dated each other. We slept with each other.’
A Feudal Outpost in Mount Lebanon
Lana Asfour
‘Intelligent, unpredictable, occasionally ruthless, Jumblatt shows that he is still very much in the game.’
A Gentle Madness
Humera Afridi
‘Pakistan is a nation of memory keepers. We feed our memories as if they are guests at tea, pay homage to them.’
A History
William Cooper
‘She was fighting for breath, fighting to live, perhaps fighting not to leave us.’

A Job on the Line
Desmond Barry
‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’

A Letter to my Sons: War’s End
Heinrich Böll
‘No, it's not easier for you than it was for us: don't let them tell you otherwise.’

A Letter to Our Son
Peter Carey
‘We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison's face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.’

A Literature for Politics: Introduction
Bill Buford
‘‘A Literature for Politics' is dedicated to a different set of possibilities - the possibilities of political engagement.’

A Plug for Bukowski
Henry Davis
‘There is an American literature that is anti-intellectual, apolitical and anti-social.’
A Poet in Cuba
Reinaldo Arenas
‘Perfect totalitarian systems have always been in the vanguard: they modify not only the past and the future, but they also abolish the present.’
A Rationalist in the Jungle
Héctor Abad
‘A pale-faced, near-sighted urbanite like me is nothing less than handicapped in the heart of the jungle.’

A Story for Aesop
John Berger
‘The image impressed me when I set eyes upon it for the first time. It was as if it were already familiar, as if, as a child, I had already seen the same man framed in a doorway.’

A True Afrikaner
Mary Benson
‘What first struck me was his courtesy: it never faltered even when some remark by the prosecutor or an action by the police angered him, hardening the expression in his blue eyes.’

A Vacation From Myself
John Beckman
‘My every next thought took a melancholy detour through drippy forests of humid emotions, often never to return’
Abbottabad Pastoral
Humera Afridi
‘Until now, I had never experienced a disaster, or witnessed mass suffering and death close up.’
According to Your Will
Naomi Alderman
‘Thank you, God,’ said the boys, ‘for not making me a woman.’ ‘Thank you, God,’ said the girls, ‘for making me according to Your will.’
Against Travel Writing
Robyn Davidson
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.

Agnès
René Belletto
‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.

Alexander Chee | Portrait of My Father
Alexander Chee
‘He left for the US while his father was away on business so he couldn’t stop him.’
Alive, Alive-Oh!
Diana Athill
‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’
America’s Secret War
Leslie Cockburn
‘Morales’s troubles began in the spring of 1984, when he was indicted for conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. It was this awkward development that made him particularly receptive to the proposal he received from a delegation of Contras and a CIA man that turned up at his Opa-locka office soon after the bad news.’

An Ofrenda for my Mother
Sandra Cisneros
‘She was a prisoner-of-war mother, banging on the bars of her cell all her life.’

An Education
Lynn Barber
‘Alan was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them.’
An Education
Lynn Barber
‘The whole meeting seemed completely unreal but then everything at that time seemed unreal, so I said ‘Yes, by all means make the film,’ and went back to the hospital and forgot about her.’
An Irrelevant Parochialism
Frederick Bowers
‘What strikes an ex-patriate most about the contemporary British novel is its conformity, its traditional sameness, and its realistically rendered provincialism.’

Anecdotes
Ann Beattie
‘Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different, with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger, and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago.’

Ann Beattie | First Sentence
Ann Beattie
‘Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea.’
Antediluvian
John Biguenet
‘To the inexperienced, hurricane stories always sound like exaggerations.’
Anthony Bailey | A London View
Anthony Bailey
I come from a generation which still, fifty-odd years on, looks up and once in a while thinks, 'Good, one of ours.'
