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Explore Essays and memoir

The Seventh Event

Richard Powers

‘Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students’

Airds Moss

Kathleen Jamie

‘It could almost have been Neolithic, an ancient and mysterious earthworks.’

Fantastic Mr Fox

Tim Adams

‘He told the police officer that he was a vegan and the next morning a little slit in the prison door opened, with his breakfast: a metal tray on which there were three frozen potatoes.’

Tim Adams on the fox hunting ban in Granta 90: Country Life.

When Grandmama Was Young

Matthew Reisz

‘They touched on some of the crucial questions about sex we are still struggling with.’

The Death of a Chair

Doris Lessing

‘To attack the chair I equipped myself with a saw, sharp scissors and a claw hammer.’

Constitutional

Helen Simpson

‘The thing about a circular walk is that you end up where you started.’

Nightwalking

Robert Macfarlane

‘Moonrise woke me at one that morning.’

The End of the Provinces

Jeremy Seabrook

‘If provincial life still exists, it does so only residually and is doomed to eventual extinction.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

‘What was it like to work in such a place?’

Made in China

Isabel Hilton

‘Visiting a factory was one thing; working in one quite another.’

A Job on the Line

Desmond Barry

‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’

Chocolate Empires

Andrew Martin

‘Q: When is a factory not a factory? A: When it’s a chocolate factory.’

Plastics

Luc Sante

‘I was fated to work in a factory.’