Explore Essays and memoir
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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.’
Gandhi the Londoner
Sam Miller
‘On 29 September 1888, an Indian teenager with a mild case of ringworm and a fine head of hair sailed into the Thames Estuary.’ Sam Miller on Ghandi's time in London.
Yiyun Li | First Sentence
Yiyun Li
‘But for her, and perhaps for many, the solidity of an invented life is not trustworthy.’
Airports: Frontier Nations
Andrés Neuman
‘1.In the waiting area of the Málaga airport for departing flights, a flock of birds nests on the beams. They fly back and forth across the high ceiling.’
Vanishing Virgil
Maaza Mengiste
‘We want to believe that we will die with dignity; that death is a confrontation and the battle is somewhat fair.’
The Story of a Variation
Milan Kundera
‘I have often heard it said that the novel has already exhausted all its possibilities. I have the opposite impression: that in four hundred years of existence the novel has missed many of its opportunities: it has left many great opportunities unexploited, many roads forgotten, many calls unheard.’
Remembering Iain M Banks
Stuart Kelly
Stuart Kelly remembers Iain Banks, and assesses the influence he's had on this generation of writers.
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.’
Dr J
Kalpana Narayanan
‘My father has his own language for everything. When I finished my MFA, I was a NINJA: No Income, No Job, No Assets.’
The Weather in Mongolia
Philip Marsden
‘In Mongolian lore, winter lasts precisely eighty-one days: nine periods of nine days’.
The Ascent of Man
Joseph O’Neill
‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’
