Explore Essays and memoir
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Essex
Norman Lewis
‘Essex is the ugliest county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and get away from the settlers from London south of the river.’
The Lord in his Wisdom
Jackie Kay
‘I realize with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin’
Watching the Rain in Galicia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘Only then did I understand where my grandmother had got that credulity which allowed her to live in a supernatural world in which everything was possible and where rational explanations were totally lacking in validity.’
The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’
Ian McEwan
‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’
Now A Major Motion Picture
Todd McEwen
‘None of these high-falutin pansy-ass would-be 'technologies' are going to save literature.’
Lagos Must Prosper
Alexis Okeowo
21 million people, $91 billion GDP, an ambitious governor whose term is up: Alexis Okeowo on the megacity of Lagos
An Escape from Kampala
Wycliffe Kato
‘‘Be brave,’ she said, ‘pull yourself together. What you are about to see is worse than you ever imagined.’ She asked if I knew what Winston Churchill had called Uganda. He had called it the pearl of Africa.’
The Conflicted Legacy of Meles Zenawi
Maaza Mengiste
‘Meles Zenawi’s legacy is as complicated as the life he chose to live, under a name (Meles) that he took from a fallen comrade during his days as a guerrilla fighter. ’
Maud Newton | Portrait of My Father
Maud Newton
‘Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.’
Chromium
Primo Levi
‘Life is full of customs whose roots can no longer be traced ... but in any event, why were pig's feet obligatory with lentils, and cheese on macaroni?’
The Snow in Ghana
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.
Bradford
Hanif Kureishi
‘Bradford, I felt, was a place I had to see for myself, because it seemed that so many important issues, of race, culture, nationalism, and education, were evident in an extremely concentrated way.’
