Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
First Train Journey
Paul Theroux
‘I had been travelling for more than ten years – in Europe, Asia and Africa – and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book.‘
Teeth
Giorgio Pressburger
‘One day in January a tall thin man with long white hair came into our courtyard. He was draped in a green cloak, torn in various places.’
Big Dome
Will Self
‘I began to conceive of the city itself as a kind of loving parent, vast but womb-like and surmounted by an overarching dome.’
The Lepers of Moyo
Paul Theroux
‘Boarding the train in the African darkness just before dawn was like climbing into the body of a huge, dusty monster'.
Road Trip
Owen Sheers
‘I’ve always been as surprised by what continues in Zimbabwe as much as by what has been lost; the shards of ‘normal’ life that survive in such a frayed society.’
England, Whose England?
Darryl Pinckney
‘My Anglophilia was something like haemophilia - that is, I was easily bruised by facts so stayed away from them.’
Memories of a Union Man
Sam Toperoff
‘It was not a graceful matter, making public your desire to have more money.’
The Last Modernist
Chris Petit
‘If there were any sense of cultural justice in this country, the Westway – that chunk of concrete modernism – would be renamed after J.G. Ballard.’
English Hours: Nothing Personal
Paul Theroux
‘England does not have a climate; it has weather, seldom dramatic.’
Salman Rushdie on Sunjeev Sahota
Salman Rushdie
‘You open a book by a writer you’ve never heard of and a new voice leaps off the page and makes you listen.’
Invasion from Outsiders
Lorna Sage
‘It seems necessary to say at the outset that I find the English novel a problematic entity, difficult to be properly sensible about.’
The Retreat from Galilee
Anton Shammas
‘Our village is built on the ruins of the Crusader castle of Fassove, which was built on the ruins of Mifshata, the Jewish village that had been settled after the destruction of the Second Temple by a group of deviant priests, and which the villagers, as a sort of Jewish-Crusader compromise, called Fassu-ta.’
