Explore Essays and memoir
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Little Sister
Anne Enright
‘The year I'm talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen’.
After the Crash
Richard Lloyd Parry
‘To travel around Java at this time was to experience a little of what it might have felt like to be a foreign tourist after the collapse of the mark in Weimar Germany.’
Richard Lloyd Parry on the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis in Indonesia.
My Frozen Father
Deborah Levy
‘Three grown-up children visit the country they were born in for the first time in twenty-three years’.
The Life and Death of a Homosexual
Pierre Clastres
‘There was no sweetness in the air that day: the corpse gave off a terrible stench’.
Unspeakable Rituals
Paul Theroux
‘Whenever people ask me about travel I always suspect they are buttonholing me, eager to relate amazing adventures of their own’.
Northern Soul
Simon Armitage
‘I live on the border, between two states. I've lived here all my life, just about, and I know this place like the back of my hand’.
God’s Country
Luc Sante
‘About forty per cent of Americans describe themselves as 'born again', a designation that covers a great many separate creeds, even, these days, a certain strain of Roman Catholicism.‘
Story of a Heel
Todd McEwen
‘ My stunningly crummy apartment–there were big holes in the walls and I lay awake nights worrying about how they got there’.
My First European
Edmund White
‘I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it.’
Knowing French
Julian Barnes
‘We still miss Miss Winstanley very much. She was a lovely lady, and certainly the life and soul of the party around Pilcher House during her time here.‘
