Explore Essays and memoir
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Film Diary
Hanif Kureishi
‘I shove the script of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid through Stephen Frears's letter box and run. He rings a few hours later: “This isn't an innocent act!”’
First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
Forced Busing in South Africa
Joseph Lelyveld
‘In the other scene of black men in the dock, there had been fifty-six of them, wearing large numbered placards around their necks so they could be identified.’
Fragments of a Nation
Nadifa Mohamed
‘I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin.’
From Lab To Writing Desk
Primo Levi
‘I had not aimed for literary celebrity, and I felt at ease with myself for having done my civic duty as a witness, and felt relieved of the burden of slavery.’
Gandhi the Londoner
Sam Miller
‘On 29 September 1888, an Indian teenager with a mild case of ringworm and a fine head of hair sailed into the Thames Estuary.’ Sam Miller on Ghandi's time in London.
George Orwell: Diaries
George Orwell
‘A jagged stone skimming across ice makes exactly the same sound as a redshank whistling.’
Ghost Species
Robert Macfarlane
‘On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost.’
Ghostlands
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat on the Anti-Rent War, one of the earliest moments of rural populism in the US, and something few know about outside the Catskill Mountains.
God and Me
Richard Mabey
‘It’s always been like this for me with spirituality. I catch a whiff of the numinous, and it turns visceral in a moment.’
God and Me
Andrew Martin
‘At the moment, I would say that depends what you mean by ‘believe’ and what you mean by “God”’
