Explore Essays and memoir
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Meeting Gorbachev
Václav Havel
‘By now the Glasnost Tsar has reached the spot where I am standing. He is rather short and stocky, a cuddly ball-like figure hemmed in by his gigantic bodyguards, giving the impression of someone shy and helpless.’
The Bank Manager
Charles Glass
‘In the south of France, at the edge of a cove that cannot be reached by road, lives an old woman from England.’
Burying the Bones
Orlando Figes
’There are times when every nation needs to think a little less about its history.‘
What I Think About When I Think About Robots
Steven Hall
‘The robot is the Godot of practical science.’
Novel Terrors
Yuka Igarashi
‘Violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it.’
August in my Father’s House
Michael Ignatieff
‘Dinner has been cleared away from the table under the mulberry tree, and she is sitting at the table with a wine glass in her hand watching the light dwindling away behind the purple leaves of the Japanese maple.’
Bogotá, Colombia
Roger Garfitt
‘Driving along la Séptima, the main road into the centre of Bogotá, we find ourselves blocked by a high-speed convoy.’
I’m Like a Bird
Nick Hornby
‘Maybe disposability is a sign of pop music's maturity, a recognition of its own limitations, rather than the converse.’
Throwing Stones at the Moon
María Victoria Jiménez
‘Maybe if I’d participated more when I was a student, I’d have had a well formed outlook about who people really are, and I would have better grasped evil.’
