Explore Essays and memoir
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Mozart, Not
Alan Rusbridger
‘It has been said that playing a Fazioli is like driving a Ferrari after driving an Austin Maestro.’
Toothpaste
Frank Snepp
‘The Vietnam war was conceived in secrecy, and one of the saddest things to me is that such secrecy has only been increased in its wake.’
Writing in the Cold
Theodore Solotaroff
‘The first years on your own are a good time to let the imagination off the leash and let it sniff and paw into other fields of writing. From journal writing it's only a small Kierkegaardian leap into the personal essay.’
The Retreat from Galilee
Anton Shammas
‘Our village is built on the ruins of the Crusader castle of Fassove, which was built on the ruins of Mifshata, the Jewish village that had been settled after the destruction of the Second Temple by a group of deviant priests, and which the villagers, as a sort of Jewish-Crusader compromise, called Fassu-ta.’
The Mind-Child: Remembering J.G. Ballard
Will Self
‘I had been struggling – as every wannabe writer should – with what it was that I could conceivably write.’
Will Self on the influence of J.G. Ballard.
Nudity
Norman Rush
‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’
A Walk Through Manchester
Michael Symmons Roberts
‘The rich, tomato red that decorated most of my bedroom – curtains, lampshade, bedspread – and the pale, rinsed-out blue like a milky north-west sky that represented the other side.’
Brief Encounter
Rupert Thomson
‘The man on the other end told me he was looking for sexual fantasies that were about eleven sentences long.’
A Hippy Among Communists
Klaus Schlesinger
‘In March 1975, thirty years after the collapse of German fascism, N., a student from Berlin – bearded and long-haired – attended a series of lectures at a university on the Baltic coast.’
The Little Museum of Memory
Mark Slouka
‘Maybe they're worried that their absence will be noticed. Maybe they just want to come home.’
