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Explore Essays and memoir

On Sweden, state power and Susan Sontag

Sigrid Rausing

‘Sweden in a sense was a celebrity state because it had become globally symbolic of the welfare state, of high taxes, of sexual education and liberation.’

Helen Gordon | What I’m Reading

Helen Gordon

Helen Gordon on three books she’s reading.

Rosalind Porter | What I’m Reading

Rosalind Porter

‘Despite the difficulties booksellers have selling the stuff, the short story isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.’

Wonder Why

Karan Mahajan

‘‘I personally could not tell what exhibits were fake and which were real,’ he wrote. ‘Why would the curators want to create this confusion and mock our very senses?’’

An Open Letter to Mbeki

Petina Gappah

‘You are human, Mr Mbeki, and are therefore prey to the resentments and obstinacies that plague the mere mortal.’

Simon Willis | What I’m Reading

Simon Willis

‘Like an excitable child, I rushed to the foyer to buy my copy.’

Opinion: Kenya

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

‘Where Kenyatta had imprisoned me for my writing, Moi sent three truckloads of armed policemen to raze to the ground the community theatre where I worked.’

Musa Qala, Afghanistan | Dispatches

James Holland

‘As I discovered, many Afghans still believe that the Taliban offers security.’

Jason Cowley | What I’m Reading

Jason Cowley

‘Music, because of its abstraction, is the most difficult of all art forms to write about with exactitude and precision.’

One Hundred: Introduction

William Boyd

Granta 100: One Hundred’s guest-editor on the challenge of putting together a milestone issue.

On Buying a Clavichord

James Fenton

‘Your clavichord breathes as sweetly as your heart.’

Human Safari

Lucy Eyre

‘We can visit them but they can’t visit us.’

Chickens and Eggs

Doris Lessing

‘Twenty-one days it takes to hatch eggs, twenty-one nights, and there sits the great fierce hen who had accepted me as protector and jailer for that time.’

Greenland

Isabel Hilton

‘Human settlement never seemed so fragile.’