Explore Essays and memoir
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Death of a Harvard Man
Simon Schama
‘The lettuce sat in its brown bag, wilting in the unseasonable warmth.’
Boys in Zinc
Svetlana Alexievich
‘I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself.’
An Egyptian in Baghdad
Amitav Ghosh
‘It was exactly three weeks since Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and miraculously, Abu-Ali, the old shopkeeper, was on his feet.’
In Soweto
Jeremy Harding
‘Now, in the first light of the liberation, Soweto was opaque and murderous.’
The Many Deaths of General Wolfe
Simon Schama
‘But what good had this done except to assuage the endless sense of impotence and rage that swelled inside him as spring turned into a scorching, dripping, foul-smelling summer?’
The Savage Notebook
Richard Holmes
‘Richard Savage remains a shadowy figure until the moment of his arrest for murder, in a back alley near Charing Cross, in November 1727.’
New York City: Crash Course
Elizabeth Hardwick
‘A spectacular warehouse this city is; folk from anywhere.’
The Paris Years of Arcadio Huang
Jonathan Spence
‘Only a handful of Chinese before him had journeyed to the West.’
The Invasion of Panama
Martha Gellhorn
‘He turned his frantic smile and his sorrowful eyes to me, making sure I understood. “Nothing like this ever happened in Panama. Never.”’
In Romania
William McPherson
‘The images of the Romanian revolution – I had seen it on television in Berlin – were still vivid in my mind.’
Europe in Ruins
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘At the end of the Second World War Europe was a pile of ruins, not merely in a physical sense; it seemed totally bankrupt in political and moral terms.’
Hans Magnus Enzensberger on Europe after the Second World War.
Bolivia, 1990
Ferdinando Scianna
‘Photographing these people I came to realize that their lives are dominated by fear: fear of old galleries falling, of dynamite, of the spirits trapped in the mine, of tuberculosis, of the disappearance of veta (the wolfram seam), of the future.’
