Explore Essays and memoir
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My Grandmother, the Censor
Masha Gessen
‘Where do crimes begin and end, and who, decades later, can be held responsible?’
Foreign Bodies
Peregrine Hodson
‘We'd reached the end of the journey: a day and a night and then home. Perhaps that was our first mistake. We forgot where we were.’
Women and Power in Cuba
Germaine Greer
‘For a feminist like me who considers that the combination of dazzle with drudgery is one of the most insidious ways in which women in our society are subject to stress, the multiplication of contradictory demands upon the Cuban women is a cause for concern.’
Best of Young British Novelists 2003: Introduction
Ian Jack
‘What had been an exercise to publicize the literary novel, at a time when there were few spotlights on this particular branch of culture, might now have a new role as an independent consumer's guide to novelists who deserved to be read in an era where 'a thrilling debut by a young writer of enormous talent' is the standard blurb, and where there are now so many spotlights directed by marketing money and the size of the writer's advance.’
Those Who Felt Differently
Ian Jack
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
On the death of Diana.
Mess
Romesh Gunesekera
‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’
The Fall of Vukovar
Jean Hatzfeld
'Jean Hatzfeld returned to the former Yugoslavia and was severely wounded by gunfire in June 1992'.
Asking for it
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Having my hair cut one morning in February 1999, I fell foul of one of those barber-shop discussions which are a feature of life here in Italy’.
Growing up with the King of Pop
Marlon James
‘The thrill of Thriller was being part of something global and local at once.’
Xiaolu Guo | My Writing Playlist
Xiaolu Guo
‘The challenge of flowing in one continuous outpouring of language in a novel is my killer.’
Beirut Diary
Robert Fisk
‘The nun beside me on the helicopter this morning had a tight, self-righteous face.’
