Explore Essays and memoir
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The Seventh Event
Richard Powers
‘Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students’
After Lockerbie
George Rosie
‘I’ve seen many images from the Lockerbie calamity since but none has stayed with me like the picture of Shannon’s pretty, smiling face.’
The River Potudan
Andrei Platonov
‘Grass had grown back on the trodden-down dirt tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped.’
Chatwin Revisited
Paul Theroux
‘He was such a darter he seldom stayed still long enough for anyone to sum him up.’
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
The Golden Goat to Communist Ratio
Miroslav Penkov
‘Few people can pinpoint where Bulgaria is on the map. Some people might tell you they can, but you shouldn’t believe them.’
Dutch Harbor Nights
Jim Ruland
‘When one of the fishermen starts belting out ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Out Tonight’, it feels like a prophecy come to life.’
The Defeated
Jonny Steinberg
‘Peter Mitchell died on a frontier, not so much between black and white, or between the landed and the landless, as between the past and the future.’
Garibaldi
Jeffrey Rotter
‘He chopped his way down North La Salle, pared the night air as he strolled along West Eugenie, peeled and julienned until at last he’d reached the dogleg at Sedgwick and Menomonee.’
On Günter Grass
Salman Rushdie
‘Migrants – borne-across humans – are metaphorical beings in their very essence.’
A Mid-life Crisis
Patrick Süskind
‘Just what exactly is it that belongs together, pray tell? Absolutely nothing!’
Fishing, Writing and Ted: An Appreciation
Graham Swift
‘Sometimes it haunts you like a knell, sometimes it's the motto for unimagined privilege.’
