Explore Essays and memoir
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The Romanovs Come to Stay
Frances Welch
‘When I was a child I seemed to live in a fog of inattention which cleared only when I was alone.’
L.A. Diary: Notes from a Mexikorean Country
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘I was reassured to see that my hotel does not resemble the one in The Shining.’
A Norwegian Nightmare
Alf Kjetil Walgermo
‘Could we somehow have avoided feeding the killer at our own breast?’
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.’
Waterway
Geoffrey Wolff
‘You would not guess looking into my son's bedroom at home that Blackwing’s ice box would have been scrubbed, but it had been scrubbed.’
Holy Solitude
Kong Yalei
‘I always think, either as a reader or as a writer, one person – anyone – can struggle against this filthy world by entering into a world of literature.’
The Sins of the Flesh
Margaret Visser
‘The message that vegetarianism imparts to the rest of us is ascetic and exclusive.’
King’s Girls
Lindsay Watson
‘The effeteness of a small number of King's students was fascinating to me at first, then repellent, and before long completely uninteresting. They dressed in peculiar clothes, talked in silly voices and appeared to me to be living caricatures of the human race. At times I longed for some familiar ordinariness and found it with boys from other colleges who introduced me to football and pool and pubs.’
The Last Eighteen Drops
Vitali Vitaliev
‘Drinking vodka is just a memory for me now. Vodka was hurting me.’
Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
