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Explore Essays and memoir

Our Shining Castle

Julia Rochester

‘Europe, for me, meant family.’

Things I Never Told Her

Marian Ryan

‘I will lay down what I want, and I will get it, and prove I am not the kind of woman who is controlled by a man.’

Love in the Graveyards of Industry

Jeremy Seabrook

‘Love was no longer encoded in recognised behaviours, but became subject to private desires and idiosyncratic needs.’

Best Book of 1868: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Laurie Sheck

‘The beauty of The Idiot lies in its opposition to closed systems.’

On Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer

Sandra Simonds

‘I gently propose that for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death we stop reading Shakespeare and shift our attention to the poems of Aemilia Lanyer’. Sandra Simonds on Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer.

Labyrinth of the Heart

Mark Slouka

‘Every marriage is forged differently; some crack at a touch, others endure beyond belief, still others are tempered by events and time.’

Possible

Wendell Steavenson

‘I don’t know how to think about this. How to stretch compassion for one person into a million.’ Wendell Steavenson on Europe’s migrant-refugee crisis.

Travels in Pornland

Andrea Stuart

‘I can easily recall my first brush with porn’

The Interpreters: Among the Brahmins of Benares

Aatish Taseer

‘That first sight of the city curled around the river goes through me like the breath of something old and known and familiar.’ Aatish Taseer revisits Varanasi.

First Sentence: Mika Taylor

Mika Taylor

‘I didn’t want reality to overwrite the story that was forming in my head.’

Best Book of 2008: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

Mika Taylor

‘Rivka Galchen’s debut novel is one of my favourites from the last few years.’

Torn Silk and Garlands of Garlic

Teffi

Teffi remembers the Armenian refugees in Novorossiisk during the Russian Revolution.

Putting Down Strangers

Adam Thorpe

‘Home, after all, is a continual plangent threnody in the often uninterpretable clamour of being an immigrant.’ Adam Thorpe on Brexit.

Peace Shall Destroy Many

Miriam Toews

‘It creates deep-seated wells of rage that find no release.’ Miriam Toews on pacifism in Mennonite communities.