Explore Essays and memoir
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Under Eastern Eyes
Timothy Garton Ash
‘They sit around, feet in slippers, drinking wine and swapping jokes about Chernobyl. They have just produced the best journal of new writing in Czechoslovakia. It took about twenty minutes.’
The Visit
Timothy Garton Ash
‘His language is a little stiff, polit-bureaucratic, but very far from being just ideological gobbledygook. Through it come glimpses of a real political intelligence, a man who knows about power.’
Golden Kids Comeback
Timothy Garton Ash
'Hips. Some never have them. Most have them but lose them. A few have them and keep them.'
Our Mother’s New Man
Andrea Ashworth
‘To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.’
Nadeem Aslam | God and Me
Nadeem Aslam
‘I loved—and continue to love—the pages of certain copies of the Qur’an.’
Dog
Nadeem Aslam
‘More than once the new dog was aggressive, a stab of fire, but I did not tell the grown-ups. I feared they would take him away.’
Where to Begin
Nadeem Aslam
‘Pages five, six and seven make her into a Pakistani, but for the first four pages she is nothing but a human being.’
God and Me
Diana Athill
‘Perhaps it’s just that the human mind is incapable of imagining anything that doesn’t begin.’
Editing Vidia
Diana Athill
‘I thought so highly of Vidia’s writing and felt his presence on our list to be so important that I simply could not allow myself not to like him.’
Alive, Alive-Oh!
Diana Athill
‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’
