Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
On Harley-Davidson
Richard Ford
‘Jack Nicholson, I've heard, used to own one. And I understand why.’
I Like Being a Woman (And I Hate Hysterical Women)
Leila Guerriero
‘One day my father called me over to explain to me about the little seed, patting my head as if he were offering me his condolences.’
Lost Cat
Mary Gaitskill
‘Which deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little?’
El Salvador: An Aide-Mémoire
Carolyn Forché
‘It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.’
The Last Vet
Aminatta Forna
‘Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.’
A Fight in Bethnal Green
Jeremy Harding
‘There was no sizing up, no graceful footwork, none of the rhetoric of the game: this was unmitigated invective.’
Nicaragua
Christopher Hitchens
‘Nicaragua has always impelled its writers into politics, or exile, or both.’
My Grandmother, the Censor
Masha Gessen
‘Where do crimes begin and end, and who, decades later, can be held responsible?’
Foreign Bodies
Peregrine Hodson
‘We'd reached the end of the journey: a day and a night and then home. Perhaps that was our first mistake. We forgot where we were.’
Women and Power in Cuba
Germaine Greer
‘For a feminist like me who considers that the combination of dazzle with drudgery is one of the most insidious ways in which women in our society are subject to stress, the multiplication of contradictory demands upon the Cuban women is a cause for concern.’
Best of Young British Novelists 2003: Introduction
Ian Jack
‘What had been an exercise to publicize the literary novel, at a time when there were few spotlights on this particular branch of culture, might now have a new role as an independent consumer's guide to novelists who deserved to be read in an era where 'a thrilling debut by a young writer of enormous talent' is the standard blurb, and where there are now so many spotlights directed by marketing money and the size of the writer's advance.’
