Explore Essays and memoir
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Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death
David Goldblatt
‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’
Maud Newton | Portrait of My Father
Maud Newton
‘Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.’
The Lord in his Wisdom
Jackie Kay
‘I realize with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin’
Essex
Norman Lewis
‘Essex is the ugliest county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and get away from the settlers from London south of the river.’
Letters to My Father, Now Dead
Teresa Pàmies
‘I was glad to see General Pavel at your funeral, Father.’
Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual
Evie Wyld
‘In the year before my first period, my mother gives me a book called Woman’s Body, An Owner’s Manual.’
Means of Transport
John Berger
‘Use these photos as means of transport. Ride on them. No passes needed. Go close. Imprudently close. They leave every minute.’
John Berger on images of violent dispossession from South Africa and Lesotho.
A Thousand Splendid Stuns
Morwari Zafar
‘More important than anything else that fateful year was the life-defining transcendence of Peter Gabriel.’
Watching the Rain in Galicia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘Only then did I understand where my grandmother had got that credulity which allowed her to live in a supernatural world in which everything was possible and where rational explanations were totally lacking in validity.’
Footplacers, London Transport, Owls, Wincer-Boise
Russell Hoban
‘All those footsteps have been gathered up into the footplacer, all those goings are gone.’
Life and Breasts
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘Death is here, by our side, and we can make no witty Nabokovian jokes about it.’
