Explore Essays and memoir
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The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
A. Kendra Greene
‘The Icelandic Phallological Museum is smaller than you’d think. The domestic collection of 212 specimens fits in one room.’
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
Rafael Frumkin
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
The Covid-19 Pandemic
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall on animal welfare, the long history of zoonotic diseases and what we must learn from Covid-19.
The Kobold
Daisy Hildyard
‘In a plain material sense the condition of being alive is that of living inside this contradiction – being membrane-bound.’
Qualities of Earth
Rebecca May Johnson
‘Allotment earth is like the cache on a public computer, it holds too much information.’
Snap
Anouchka Grose
‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’
Clarity
Ruchir Joshi
‘I was close to my own father, which many people are not.’
Ruchir Joshi remembers his son.
What History Tells Us About Epidemics
Sandra Hempel
‘From when we first began living together in settlements, bacteria and viruses were with us, replicating, mutating and jumping species with extraordinary agility.’
The Lessons We Choose
Beth Gardiner
This will not be the last crisis. What can we learn from this one?
The Medical Detective
Sandra Hempel
An extract from Sandra Hempel’s The Medical Detective, which follows the story of the man who identified – and helped stop – the cholera pandemic of the 1830s.
From the Spanish Flu to Covid-19
Reina James
Reina James compares our response to Covid-19 to the reaction to the Spanish Flu in 1918.
