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Explore Essays and memoir

The Handbag Studio

Thomas Keneally

‘In Los Angeles in late October of 1980, I was feeling the strange, malign electricity the Santa Ana winds bring to the city.’

Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes

Jonathan Lethem

‘Writing about Cassavetes feels like vocalese: putting lyrics to passages of jazz improvisation.’

Little Durga

Shampa Banerjee

‘I groaned inwardly when anybody mentioned Pather Panchali and my small part in it.’

Two Years in the Dark

Andrew O’Hagan

‘There's no right or wrong about this, there's only style.’

Germany

Chris Petit

‘From an early age I stalked movies for clues to a life I didn't understand.’

Quiet, Please

Adam Mars-Jones

‘Film music can be stained glass or wallpaper.’

Dr Gonad

Atom Egoyan

‘Few careers fascinate me more than that of Paul Thomas.’

Worried? Us?

Bill McKibben

‘Though we know that our culture has placed our own lives on a demonic fast-forward, we imagine that the earth must work on some other timescale.’

The Weather in Mongolia

Philip Marsden

‘In Mongolian lore, winter lasts precisely eighty-one days: nine periods of nine days’.

Rowing to Alaska

Wayne McLennan

‘I can't remember whose idea it was, whose heart first beat faster, who made the other excited, but at some point Doug and I decided to row a boat to Alaska.’

The Greenland Pump

Matthew Hart

‘In its currents the ocean is printing news about our future, and we must keep up on the latest bulletins.’

The Evidence of Man

Edward Burtynsky & Noah Richler

‘When I’m photographing something in the industrial landscape, I’m looking at whatever is that residual thing.’

Captain Scott’s Biscuit

Thomas Keneally

‘So the Ross Sea Novotel and McMurdo Sheraton could be built within this century. Children will gambol on the ice shelf where Scott exhaled his last, pained breath.’

Bone Litter

Marian Botsford Fraser

‘There is a tiny skull on a pillow of bright green moss, and arm and leg bones neatly crossed, as if they had just been gently placed there in mourning.’