Explore Essays and memoir
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Nicaragua
Christopher Hitchens
‘Nicaragua has always impelled its writers into politics, or exile, or both.’
Dividing the Kingdom
Pico Iyer
‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’
The Fall of Saigon
James Fenton
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
Arguing With The Dead
Dan Jacobson
‘My childhood was spent in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in South Africa.In those years most of the mines were no longer being worked’.
A Journey into Afghanistan
Peregrine Hodson
‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’
Motley Notes
Ian Jack
‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’
Janesville, Wisconsin
Steven Greenhouse
‘To them, the emphasis was on the ‘creative’ part of creative destruction. But in Janesville, few could see beyond the destruction.’
On Harley-Davidson
Richard Ford
‘Jack Nicholson, I've heard, used to own one. And I understand why.’
The Politics of Grief
V. V. Ganeshananthan
‘It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn.’
