Explore Essays and memoir
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Twenty-Eight Days in Baghdad
Nuha al-Radi
‘Rumsfeld says everything is improving day by day. I suggest he come live here for a couple of days and then say that.’
Undoing the folded lie: Poetry after 9/11
Rachael Allen
‘The real feeling of a day that changed everything forever is boiled down so incessantly, and so often, to cliché.’
Fat Girls in Des Moines
Bill Bryson
‘When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a Mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.’
Blood
Urvashi Butalia
‘Stories are all that people have, stories that rarely breach the frontiers of family and religious community’
Maruti 800
Rana Dasgupta
‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’
To the Lighthouse
Helen Dunmore
‘There are novels which have an almost uncanny power to renew themselves in the reader’s imagination.’
Chinua Achebe’s Legacy
Ike Anya
‘Who will speak out for us now? Who will ask the hard questions of us and the world that he did?’
It Don’t Mean a Thing
Paul Auster
‘The single inhabitant of an asteroid that orbits around a tertiary moon of Pluto, visible only through the strongest telescope.’
The Foreign Correspondent
Pallavi Aiyar
‘The absence of Indian foreign correspondents was, and is, unexceptional.’
Poetry in Britain
Gillian Clarke
‘Poetry must always find new ways to sing, must be fresh, must surprise, must take us by the heart with its song, its imagery, its syntax. But it can still be simple, grammatical, and speak plain English.’
Refugee Dreams
Peter Behrens
‘In his mind he is back in Frankfurt once more, trying to catch that last train across the frontier.’
A Job on the Line
Desmond Barry
‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’
