Explore Essays and memoir
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Between Great Fires
William Atkins
‘This is the perennial anxiety – that at any moment, day or night, you might be snatched and shackled and tried and sent back.’
Black Country
Anthony Cartwright
‘There’s a sense, I think, that what that X in the box translates as is seventeen and a half million voices that say, we’re still here.’
Blind Spot
Teju Cole
‘I heard faint noises, the occasional car going down another street, a voice lightly thrown from its unseen body, the hum of distant machines, and the sound of my own breathing as I put one foot in.’
Blood
Urvashi Butalia
‘Stories are all that people have, stories that rarely breach the frontiers of family and religious community’
Boys in Zinc
Svetlana Alexievich
‘I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself.’
Bread of Beirut
Annia Ciezadlo
‘Whenever there’s the threat of violence, people rush to the bakery for bread, of course, but also, I suspect, for reassurance.’
Breasts: A History
Krys Malcolm Belc
‘My breasts are shrinking. As my fat redistributes it settles in my belly and leaves my chest.’
Brexit Win
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
‘The poor hated the poor, natives hated outsiders, settled migrants hated new incomers, the North hated the South, non-Londoners hated London.’
Bucharest, Broken City
Philip Ó Ceallaigh
‘It is only consciousness and memory that hold together the things we sometimes see as solid.’
Buchenwald
Ian Buruma
‘Once upon a time, on top of a green hill, high above the red roofs of Weimar, there was an oak tree.’
But Why Write? The Writer-To-Be
Walter Abish
‘How to explain this resolve to write, this firm unwavering intent to become a writer on the part of someone who may not even really care for books?’
Cairo: September 2014
Wiam El-Tamami
‘Over the past few months, the government has been ad-libbing the time.’
