Explore Essays and memoir
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One Day I Will Write About This Place
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘We are, it seems, in the middle of nowhere.’
Lavande
Ann Beattie
‘It seemed impossible, but probably everyone marries thinking such a thing impossible.’
How It Ends
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Seagulls murmur overhead, and nip at the banks. You can hear almost nothing.’
How to be Gay and Indian
Manil Suri
‘This was supposed to be my great in-your-face coming-out campaign, which I’d fretted over for months beforehand. Had India suddenly lost its conservativeness, turned enlightened, even hip?’
Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road
Russell Hoban
‘Music is a puissant recaller of time past; music is memory's sister and for its very life relies on memory to hold in our minds the passage of sounds through time.’
Interesting if True
Phillip Knightley
‘The end of the war in the Pacific came just before I left school.’
The Pretty Women of Paris
Anonymous
‘For the last fifteen years she has been richly kept by a Russian prince, who revels in her brutality, viciousness, extravagance and love of brandy.’
Famished Eels
Mary Rokonadravu
‘After one hundred years, this is what I have: a daguerreotype of her in bridal finery; a few stories told and retold in plantations, kitchens, hospitals, airport lounges.’
Dear Peter
Simon Armitage & Ted Hughes
An unpublished letter by Ted Hughes, introduced by Simon Armitage. ‘It’s reassuring to see a spelling mistake (‘style’ for stile), and I love the maps.’
The Ambivalent
Paulo Scott
‘He not only sees the World Cup as a ceasefire, but also as a series of sleights of hand that hide what’s really going on, political debauchery, spin and chicanery.’
