Explore Essays and memoir
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The Future of Colombia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘With the hindsight of six years, it is clear that Colombia missed the opportunity to spare itself many of the horrors now afflicting it.’
Is Nothing Sacred?
Salman Rushdie
‘I grew up kissing books and bread.’
Salman Rushdie defends the act of writing novels.
On the Road to Timișoara
Christopher Hitchens
‘“Have you heard?“ said Ferenc, “Ceaușescu has been assassinated.”’
North of North
Bill Bryson
‘I had also long harboured a curious, half-formed urge to see what life was like in such a remote and cheerless place.’
Looking for Jiří Wolf
Graham Swift
‘The fact remains that when I did ask questions, I got the same response: genuine, not stimulated, ignorance. No one seemed to have heard of him.’
The Borderlands
Neal Ascherson
‘Here is the forest. Not just a forest, but a puszcza: a Polish word that means a world of trees which have never been felled since the first bands of human beings arrived to hunt here.’
Turia
Michael Ignatieff
‘Turia’s room is at the end of an aquamarine-tiled corridor in a mansion in Holland Park, built for a department-store millionaire before the First War and now used as a halfway house for mental patients.’
A Childhood in Broadmoor Hospital
Patrick McGrath
‘These were the friends of my early boyhood, men who twenty years earlier would still have been called ‘criminal lunatics’.‘
First Train Journey
Paul Theroux
‘I had been travelling for more than ten years – in Europe, Asia and Africa – and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book.‘
Beirut Diary
Robert Fisk
‘The nun beside me on the helicopter this morning had a tight, self-righteous face.’
