Issue 136

Suzanne Brøgger

‘My habit of being a dreamer is filled with the joy of melancholy.’

Issue 137

Ivan Chistyakov

‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’

Diane Cook

Diane Cook shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Lucy Caldwell

Julian Baggini

‘Whether or not you think 23 June was a great day for Britain and Europe, it was a very bad one for freedom.’

Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett on the Hawe family murder-suicide, and what the Irish media’s coverage tells us about the nation’s prejudices.

Paula Bohince

‘I love Shakespeare’s slow insistence, which mirrors the action within the poem: there is nothing but grief to reach.’ Paula Bohince on Shakespeare’s sonnet 50.

Linda H. Davis

‘I had become the kind of parent I never wanted to be.’

Linda H. Davis

‘Plunged inside the skin of the horse, I felt his sensory burdens, sufferings and fears: his keen sensitivity to sound, smell and touch (even the weight of a saddle)’

Tara Bergin

Astrid Alben

‘2016 is almost over but the impact of this year’s political events will reverberate around the globe for decades.’

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

‘Britain has made the control of borders and the free movement of people its central obsession, its fundamental national anxiety.’ Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Brexit.

Lily Dunn

Lily Dunn on her father’s losing battle with alcoholism.

Madeleine Bunting

‘Brexit demonstrates one of England’s most trusted strategies of power: deliberate forgetfulness.’