Explore Essays and memoir
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God and Me
Andrew Martin
‘At the moment, I would say that depends what you mean by ‘believe’ and what you mean by “God”’
Brand Leader
Fintan O’Toole
‘It was a clear, uncomplicated space, a brand image, a label that could be stuck on a billion sauce bottles.’
A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out
Milan Kundera
‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’
Madrid
Tony Lyons
‘There was a note on the table: Phone Rafa, 983754. There were different Rafas known to me in Madrid, and at the moment I was in touch with none of them.’
Progress in Prague
Ivan Klíma
‘People in the West are aware of the hardship and bewilderment that accompanied the political and economic transformation of central and eastern Europe after 1989.'
My Frozen Father
Deborah Levy
‘Three grown-up children visit the country they were born in for the first time in twenty-three years’.
Fragments of a Nation
Nadifa Mohamed
‘I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin.’
Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
A Warsaw Diary
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘In Poland we read every text as allusive; every situation described - even the most remote in time and space - is immediately applied to Poland.’
Captain Scott’s Biscuit
Thomas Keneally
‘So the Ross Sea Novotel and McMurdo Sheraton could be built within this century. Children will gambol on the ice shelf where Scott exhaled his last, pained breath.’
Chickens and Eggs
Doris Lessing
‘Twenty-one days it takes to hatch eggs, twenty-one nights, and there sits the great fierce hen who had accepted me as protector and jailer for that time.’
Walker Brothers
Peter Orner
‘When Allen Dorfman was gunned down in the parking lot of the purple Hyatt in Lincolnwood, my grandfather took great pride in the fact that one of our own was still high enough in the mob to rub out.’
