Essays that explore everything from the period of second-hand bookshops to the dubious profession of being a critic, from freedom of the press to what patriotism really means.

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Whether puncturing the lies of politicians or telling unpalatable truths about wars, Orwell's uncompromising essays are more relevant and essential than ever in today's era of spin.

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"More than just an offbeat romantic comedy - it's a provocative meditation on the essence of personality and the nature of the biographer's task."
- Michael Upchurch of San Francisco Chronicle

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"The blunt tongue cuts the sharpest;
clarity: a drop of blood breaking in water.
We used sex to numb the small scalpel
of love outlining our joined bodies.
As I use words as an anaesthetic for truth."

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"The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course."

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Moving and intimate, Hemingway in Love is the repentantly candid chapter missing from the definitive biography of a literary giant. The truth of his first marriage and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking.

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"Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"

A frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom.

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"Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free."

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Still our favourite book, and my favourite shit-stirrer of all time. Taleb's "Antifragile"
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With illustrations of 100 artworks that have attracted critical and public hostility, Susie Hodge argues persuasively and passionately against the most common disparaging remark leveled at modern art, demonstrating that contemporary art is not - & never has been - child's play.

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The winner of the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction, Ministry of Moral Panic contains stories that encompass a skewed world fraught with prestige anxiety, moral relativism, sexual frankness and the improbable necessity of human connection.

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Language

"You will learn me all over again. Words you've known since
childhood, tongues of your adult life, all will take on new
meaning. Not once, but once again."

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Question

"Do you have furniture-shaped holes
in your heart? You must, because I have

a chair, desk, clothes rack, refrigerator
all apart from, a part of you. Is this why

it is hard to love me, you, threadbare
of furnishing, naked of me?"

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"The more distant the goal the more necessary it becomes to move forward. Not in haste, but not at our leisure."

Essential reading for both Gaiman and non-Gaiman fans!!
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pineapple express
- cop 223: "do you... like pineapple
if people, like pineapple cans, were sorted
in batches with the same expiry date
would you seek out your batchmates?