Explore Essays and memoir
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Reflections on Exile
Edward W. Said
‘Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people.’
Summers with Juliet
Bill Roorbach
‘At eight I was interested in fishing, reading and the diligent scavengering of fabulous pieces of glass and metal and, sometimes, wood.’
A Note on Shakespeare
Harold Pinter
‘Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed. We tell when it ceases to beat and tell it at its highest peak of fever‘, Harold Pinter in 'A Note on Shakespeare' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
In My Father’s Footsteps
Francesca Segal
‘The two monoliths that dominated my father’s identity – the peak and the trough of his life – were Love Story and Parkinson’s disease.’
Teachers
Sandy Tolan
‘They came from Europe, Palestine and America, drawn by the story of Ramzi and Al Kamandjâti, by the young traveller’s spirit of adventure, and by the desire to use their musical talents for work that could make a difference in the world.’
Self-Consciousness
Edward W. Said
‘It was through my mother that I grew more aware of my body as incredibly fraught and problematic.’
Los Angeles Without A Map
Richard Rayner
‘I was a hysterical adolescent. But I was a hysterical adolescent with a credit card and there was a seat available.’
The Contents of Pockets
Luc Sante
‘Time in its passing casts off particles of itself in the form of images, documents, relics, junk.‘
The Diary of A Political Idiot
Jasmina Tesanovic
‘Belgrade is rocking, shaking, trembling. We are entering the second phase of NATO intervention. The sirens went off today for nearly twenty-four hours.’
Twins
Jeremy Seabrook
‘Separation has been, perhaps, the single biggest determining influence in my life.’
The Final Days of Dr Doe
Lynda Schuster
‘In the summer of 1990, tens of thousands of Liberians died in a civil war of remarkable brutality. Many more starved to death'.
Going Back
Sigrid Rausing
‘We rowed towards it, further out than perhaps we should have, with the particular anarchic freedom of rowing a small rubber dinghy to sea after at least two glasses of wine.’
