Explore Essays and memoir
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The Old Silk Route
Colin Thubron
‘If I had charted the most landlocked spot on earth, the arms of my compass would have intersected here, in China's far northwest.’
The Fixer
Snigdha Poonam
‘In Indian media and advertising, young people are mainly being projected as vessels of breathless aspiration.’
Deng’s Dogs
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘My earliest memory of Peru is a newspaper photograph from 1980 of dead dogs hanging from lamp posts in downtown Lima.’
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
Poland
Ronald Sukenick
‘Most of those released have trouble finding work, some have been suspended with seventy-five per cent pay, and others must now work freelance or get jobs writing for publications like technical journals.’
Dervishes
Rory Stewart
‘For a Dervish, religion is all about some direct mystical experience of God’.
Breach Candy
Samanth Subramanian
‘There are clubs like the Breach Candy Club all over the Indian subcontinent: relics of the Raj, institutions that were set up as bolt-holes for the British, where they could retreat to row or swim or play cricket or race horses.’
The Seventh Event
Richard Powers
‘Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students’
A Family in Nanjing
Colin Thubron
‘The old people had prepared a banquet for me - an extravagant spread of cold meats and dumplings which we ate with the prestige television blaring, and nobody watching it.’
The Road to Ginger Riley’s
Paul Toohey
‘Mike Fordham lies under a makeshift canvas shelter at the turn-off, dying.’
Thank God We’ve Got A Navy
Brian Thompson
‘Today it is usual—especially among those who have never faced conscription—to describe national service as time wasted, even an offence against civil liberties in some sinister way.’
