Explore Essays and memoir
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Perchance to Pick One’s Nose
Jan Morris
‘Shame and regret are certainly not the same things: je ne regrette rien, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins.’
Never Againism
Philip Gourevitch
‘Anniversaries can have an importance—a power over us—that we do not control.’
Aspirers
Pankaj Mishra
‘Bollywood is part of what our culture has become. We are lying to ourselves all the time.’
Osama’s War
Wendell Steavenson
‘He, of course, had nothing to be frightened of; if he died as a mujahid he was going to a paradise heaven.’
The Tailor of Gujarat
Amit Chaudhuri
‘He was desperate for the photograph to cease to exist: as if the man in the photo and he are competing for the same oxygen.’
When I Last Saw Him
Blake Morrison
‘When young, we were impatient with our parents: now we want to atone for our callowness, to take measure of them, to understand which parts of them live on in us.’
Pilgrim
Patricia Hampl
‘Real travel wants to be dangerous, wants to smoke out the truth of the Other—providing of course you get out alive.’
Making an Elephant
Graham Swift
‘The death of a father is, in most cases, an inevitable passage of life.’
The French Lieutenant’s Diary
John Fowles
‘It was really just one visual idea: a woman standing at the end of the Cobb and staring mysteriously out to sea.’
The Best Picture He Ever Saw
Ian Jack
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
Ian Jack recalls the missing buildings of his hometown, Farnworth.
