Explore Essays and memoir
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An Escape from Kampala
Wycliffe Kato
‘‘Be brave,’ she said, ‘pull yourself together. What you are about to see is worse than you ever imagined.’ She asked if I knew what Winston Churchill had called Uganda. He had called it the pearl of Africa.’
New New World
Peter Conrad
‘I left Australia at the age of twenty, carrying with me everything I thought I would need.’
The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’
Ian McEwan
‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’
Eating the Eggs of Love
Salman Rushdie
‘Forested mesas flanked the road to Matagalpa; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon.’
Other Women
Francine Prose
‘Feminism is as basic to my sense of self as the fact that I have brown eyes.’
People Don’t Get Depressed in Nigeria
Ike Anya
‘He has come to us against the wishes of his family and the village and I feel that I owe him something.’
Rabih Alameddine | Portrait of My Father
Rabih Alameddine
‘I come from a family that hangs pictures of family on its walls.’
Nuclear Arms And The Fate Of The Earth
Jonathan Schell
‘We have lived in the shadow of nuclear arms for more than thirty-six years, so it does not seem too soon for us to familiarize ourselves with them - to acquaint ourselves with such matters as the ‘thermal pulse’, the ‘blast wave’, and the ‘three stages of radiation sickness.’’
