In 2005 Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a blisteringly satirical essay on ‘How to Write about Africa’ in response to Granta’s Africa issue.
Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian...
On Saturday, July 30, Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential...
In this podcast, Tariq Ali reads extracts from his Diary about North Korea. The full article is below. Forty-two years ago, I was mysteriously invited to visit North Korea. Pakistan’s...
I was friendly with Jeanette Winterson in the 1980s – we even went away for a weekend together. I went slightly cool on the friendship, though she didn’t exactly do anything wrong. We...
In Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, Sir James Manson hires a mercenary called ‘Cat’ Shannon to stage a coup in the tiny West African state of Zangaro – Equatorial...
A week before Christmas, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal and already serving life for three murders, was given another life sentence at the Palais de Justice...
6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and...
Only after Charles Dickens was dead did the people who thought they were closest to him realise how little they knew about him. His son Henry remembered once playing a memory game with him: My...
In the summer of 1771 William Constable had just returned to Burton Constable, his house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, after a lavish Grand Tour. He and his sister Winifred had spent...
To those of us who hoped that Barack Obama’s election marked a departure from right-wing rule, the president’s failure of leadership has been stunning. Seldom have insurgent...
Eva Braun kept photograph albums. Whether lounging on the terrace at the Berghof or tagging along on a state visit to Italy, she was always snapping away. Her first and only proper job was...
We met every afternoon for two weeks in N’Djamena. After the midday prayer, I would pick him up in a taxi at the shop he hoped to turn into a laundry. We ate fish and rice in my hotel room...
If you want to be loved in America, get rich and make it seem that you got rich doing exactly what you wanted to do and being exactly who you wanted to be. Invent a machine – or better, a...
Tamara Chalabi’s chronicle of her family might make for an ideal TV series, recounting as it does a comforting upper-class idyll complete with loyal attendants, marred only by revolution,...
The day before Remembrance Sunday the people in Oxford Street told themselves to remember there were fewer than 50 shopping days until Christmas. Even in our down times, London is a formidable...
At the turning point of this second volume of Beckett’s letters, which is also the turning point of his professional life, the moment when, after so many years of ‘retyping …...
Pitt Street in Wellington runs just below the crest of a ridge. It is steep. When you look up to the houses, you don’t see much more than roofs. To reach the front gates you take paths...