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Explore Essays and memoir

Against Travel Writing

Robyn Davidson

’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.

It Don’t Mean a Thing

Paul Auster

‘The single inhabitant of an asteroid that orbits around a tertiary moon of Pluto, visible only through the strongest telescope.’

Obedience

Ian Parker

‘Herbert Winer, who has not tortured anyone for nearly forty years, lives in New Haven, Connecticut, as he did in the early Sixties.’

Ian Parker on authority, ethics and human behaviour.

Paolo

Tim Parks

‘My last glimpse of Paolo was on the platform at Verona station when I pointed him out to the police.’

The Oddity of Height

Fergus Fleming

‘The culprit was height.’

In Search of the Third Way

Roy Hattersley

‘The evidence suggests that the Third Way is a reactive rather than a creative force, a response rather than an original idea.’

New New World

Peter Conrad

‘I left Australia at the age of twenty, carrying with me everything I thought I would need.’

Marrying Eddie

Robyn Davidson

‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’

The Weeping Pom

Howard Jacobson

‘I hold the view that Australia is a more sweetly civilized country than England, but I don’t want people to think I’ve gone soft in the head.’

The Road to Ginger Riley’s

Paul Toohey

‘Mike Fordham lies under a makeshift canvas shelter at the turn-off, dying.’

The Germaine Tape

Georgia Blain

‘I wished the tape would end.’

Going Abroad

W.G. Sebald

‘In Vienna I visited none of the sights and spoke not a word to a soul’.