Explore Essays and memoir
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Life and Breasts
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘Death is here, by our side, and we can make no witty Nabokovian jokes about it.’
Ludmila Ulitskaya | On Europe
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘It seems clear to me that during the past ten years, Russia has reached the apex of its estrangement from Europe.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.
Magpie
Esther Woolfson
‘His life was one of calculation and endeavour, of learning and watching, remembering and trying.’
Maori War
Peter Walker
‘It would be hard to overstate the importance of genealogy in Maori society.’
Morwari Zafar | Is Travel Writing Dead?
Morwari Zafar
‘What satellites and the internet don’t do is give a voice to experience. And that’s where travel writing endures.’
Mrs de Pelet
Evie Wyld
‘I see her with her hands cupped in front of her shouting ‘The “O”, ladies, The Vaginal O’ as we read Shakespeare.’
My First European
Edmund White
‘I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it.’
Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
New York
James Wolcott
‘Shiny and bright and compact, 'Heartburn’ whirrs along, not so much a novel as an appliance - an appliance whose inner workings are on the fritz.’
Notes from Italy
William Weaver
‘It was easy to meet people, especially if you were a wide-eyed American and spoke Italian. The literary world was particularly accessible, for all the intellectuals wanted to know about the States.’
Notes from New York
James Wolcott
‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’
