Explore Essays and memoir
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Daughter of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
‘As a child, my grandmother brushed her teeth every day with radioactive toothpaste.’
Diary of a London Lockdown
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
Rafael Frumkin
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
Five Images from the Life of Georg Trakl
Mathias Énard
‘We think we see Georg Trakl in this last photograph but we do not see him.’
Forced Out
Kevin Maxwell
An excerpt from Kevin Maxwell’s exposé of structural racism in the British police force.
From the Spanish Flu to Covid-19
Reina James
Reina James compares our response to Covid-19 to the reaction to the Spanish Flu in 1918.
Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin
Robert Becker
‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’
History is a Music Box
Channa Riedel
‘My hands are cupped around the names written on the tablets of stone.’
Holding Up the Sky
Rod Mason & Charles Massy
‘Fire, wind, rain. We’re gonna meet all them three one day, all together, fire, wind and rain, all together one day very soon if we don’t do something about what’s happened and happening.’
How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests?
Megan Price, Morgan Agnew & David Peters
Why is it so hard to roll out accurate antibody tests? Statisticians break down the challenges that come with testing for coronavirus immunity.
I Remember
Georges Perec
Entries from Georges Perec’s I Remember, translated from the French by Philip Terry and David Bellos.
