Explore Essays and memoir
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Under Eastern Eyes
Timothy Garton Ash
‘They sit around, feet in slippers, drinking wine and swapping jokes about Chernobyl. They have just produced the best journal of new writing in Czechoslovakia. It took about twenty minutes.’
Glitches
John Gregory Dunne
‘I prefer not to speculate about what might have happened if I had not taken the ECG.’
Refugee Dreams
Peter Behrens
‘In his mind he is back in Frankfurt once more, trying to catch that last train across the frontier.’
A Poet in Cuba
Reinaldo Arenas
‘Perfect totalitarian systems have always been in the vanguard: they modify not only the past and the future, but they also abolish the present.’
Winter
Rich Cohen
‘When everyone was asleep, we put on our boots and waded out into the drifts of Glencoe – a suburban street remade into an eerie winter-scape.’
An Irrelevant Parochialism
Frederick Bowers
‘What strikes an ex-patriate most about the contemporary British novel is its conformity, its traditional sameness, and its realistically rendered provincialism.’
Alive, Alive-Oh!
Diana Athill
‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’
Lovely Girls, Very Cheap
Decca Aitkenhead
‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.
To the Lighthouse
Helen Dunmore
‘There are novels which have an almost uncanny power to renew themselves in the reader’s imagination.’
On the Roof
Geoff Dyer
‘Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you—and it's as patient as death.’
A Job on the Line
Desmond Barry
‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’
The Fig Tree and the Wasp
Brian Chikwava
‘The day I first saw the dance was the day we had expected to end with the execution of my maternal grandfather.’
