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Explore Essays and memoir

The Search for Dr Bloch

Jason Cowley

‘How did it feel to have a Jewish grandfather who owed his life to the friendship, or gratitude, or mercy, of Adolf Hitler?’

Milošević In Prison

Dragisa Blanusa

‘Slobodan Milošević was coming to my prison.’

I Gave the Names

Adrian Leftwich

‘We are all capable of self-deceit, especially when seeking to tell the truth.’

Dervishes

Rory Stewart

‘For a Dervish, religion is all about some direct mystical experience of God’.

The Great Return

Milan Kundera

‘The decades hovered above the dishes’.

The Chelsea Affect

Arthur Miller

‘Despite parboiling myself in the shower a few times I began to like the hotel.’

Resistance

Richard Sennett

‘For musicians, the sense of touch defines our physical experience of art’

Frank’s Place

Richard Williams

‘Marilyn Monroe spent a couple of nights at the Cal-Neva. Sinatra knew she was in a bad way.’

Brandy

Philip Hensher

‘So there is music and music. It is not easy, after all.’

Baht ’At

Blake Morrison

‘I'd already begun to suspect that sex brought misery or death, and now I knew.’

Klever Kaff

Ian Jack

‘She was an extraordinary person, and an ordinary one.’

Ian Jack on the life of Kathleen Ferrier, the English contralto singer.

Translating Caetano

John Ryle

‘The beat of the city was shot through with drumming patterns used to invoke them in the Saturday night ceremonies.’

La Mer

Nicholson Baker

‘I heard Debussy's side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests’