Explore Essays and memoir
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Rachel Seiffert on Vanessa Barbara
Rachel Seiffert & Vanessa Barbara
‘A story that starts with a bereavement: already I’m drawn in.’
Xiaolu Guo | My Writing Playlist
Xiaolu Guo
‘The challenge of flowing in one continuous outpouring of language in a novel is my killer.’
Gandhi the Londoner
Sam Miller
‘On 29 September 1888, an Indian teenager with a mild case of ringworm and a fine head of hair sailed into the Thames Estuary.’ Sam Miller on Ghandi's time in London.
Moscow
Patrick Cockburn
‘Despite all the secrecy, what was happening in the Soviet Union was obvious enough: the old order, the wartime generation, was dying.’
The Muse in the Cellar
James Lasdun
‘It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator.’
God and Me
Lucretia Stewart
‘It’s almost impossible to describe how it feels to believe in God. There really aren’t words elevated enough to explain it.’
Road to Chitral
Azhar Abidi
‘I wonder sometimes when this cycle of violence began. When was year zero?’
Deng’s Dogs
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘My earliest memory of Peru is a newspaper photograph from 1980 of dead dogs hanging from lamp posts in downtown Lima.’
Maruti 800
Rana Dasgupta
‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’
The Imam and the Indian
Amitav Ghosh
‘We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person.’
Kashmir
James Buchan
‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’
Lovely Girls, Very Cheap
Decca Aitkenhead
‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.
