Explore Essays and memoir
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Bandit
Molly Brodak
‘There are fragments of a criminal alongside fragments of a dad, and nothing overlaps, nothing eclipses the other, they’re just there, next to each other. No narrative fits.’
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.’
Lovely Girls, Very Cheap
Decca Aitkenhead
‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.
Life Among the Pirates
Daniel Alarcón
‘Being pirated is the Peruvian equivalent of making the bestseller list.’
We Have No Minorities
George Bowater
‘The state can burn houses but it can't stop the rain, can't round up all the sheep. It isn't an easy place to control.’
After Maidan
Oliver Bullough
‘A woman asked the steward behind the registration desk if our flight to Moscow was domestic or international. “We are still working on that,” the man answered.’
Moscow
Patrick Cockburn
‘Despite all the secrecy, what was happening in the Soviet Union was obvious enough: the old order, the wartime generation, was dying.’
Inside Intelligence
Anthony Cavendish
‘Good heavens, old boy! It isn't the Russians we worry about; it's the British public that we don't want to know about it.’
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.’
Naomi Alderman | My Writing Playlist
Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman shares five songs she loves to write to.
A Literature for Politics: Introduction
Bill Buford
‘‘A Literature for Politics' is dedicated to a different set of possibilities - the possibilities of political engagement.’
