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Explore Essays and memoir

Introduction: What Have We Done

Sigrid Rausing

‘There is an apocalyptic feeling in the air. I write the day after the news that the IS have blown up parts of the ancient site of Palmyra.’

The Invitation

Barry Lopez

‘The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.’

Whale Fall

Rebecca Giggs

‘The whale as landfill. It was a metaphor, and then it wasn’t.’

The Legacy

Fred Pearce

‘It created not just a climate of fear, but also a landscape of secrets.’

Upriver

Kathleen Jamie

‘I liked the way she travelled: with her iPod in one pocket, her traditional Yup’ik woman’s knife, or ulu, in the other.’

The Hand’s Breadth Murders

Adam Nicolson & Gus Palmer

‘It is what happens in a place where revenge is the only justice.’

Fragments

Roger Deakin & Robert Macfarlane

‘Entering a wood is to enter an element as different as the sea.’

Lessons

Diana Athill

‘My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness.’

An (almost) perfect day

Anne De Gelas

‘I think of the self-portrait as a mirror of all the violence that befalls us.’

Saving Mesopotamia

Alexandra Lucas Coelho

‘What they are excavating is the birth of a civilisation.’

Greg Jackson | First Sentence

Greg Jackson

‘I am being, I believe, about as forthright as I am being coy.’

Hotel Haunting

Joanna Walsh

‘There was a time in my life when I lived in hotels. Around this time, the time I did not spend in hotels was time I did not live.’

Budapest 2015

Wojciech Tochman

‘To the delight of the little kids, who had seen a good deal of killing in their lives, a middle-aged man blew soap bubbles.’

Refugees and Europe: The Swedish Exception

Göran Rosenberg

‘What would it take to turn the downward spiral of anti-refugee policies around?’