Explore Essays and memoir
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Blitzed Beijing
Robert Macfarlane
‘It’s at night that you really notice the dust, because artificial light suddenly makes the fines visible.’
Blood Is Usually Red
Katherine Faw Morris
‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’
Blue Moon
Hiromi Kawakami
‘Rather than death itself, it is the disappearance of traces that seems unbearable and sad. The disappearance of all signs that I existed.’
Boar
Leo Mellor
‘A rustle in the bracken; then, almost immediately, a snout and some wiry black hair.’
Bohemian Rhapsody in Five Acts
Tiffany Murray
Tiffany Murray on living with Freddie Mercury as a child.
Books Do Furnish a Room
Penelope Lively
‘The shelves say something about the person who has stocked them; they say much.’
Bookshelves: John Berger in My Family Album
Amitava Kumar
‘The contours of the family arranged on the bookshelf shifted.’
Boxing
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.
Bradford
Hanif Kureishi
‘Bradford, I felt, was a place I had to see for myself, because it seemed that so many important issues, of race, culture, nationalism, and education, were evident in an extremely concentrated way.’
Bradistan
Zaiba Malik
‘I knew I was Pakistani long before I knew I was English, just as I knew I was Muslim long before I knew I was British.’
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.’
Breaking In
Andrew Motion
‘He dedicated The Less Deceived to her: it was the only collection of poems he dedicated to anyone.‘