Why the Novel Matters?
1925
Starting with the essayistic narcissism of meditating on his own writing hand, Lawrence then segues into why he writes novels: the novelist’s wisdom being the only one, he beli...
Read Essay
Why Read the Classics? (First printed in L’Espresso , 28 June 1981, and republished in The Literature Machine / The Uses of Literature)
1981
Calvino lists several definitions of ‘the classics’, starting with the witty observation that they are those books adults usually claim they are ‘rereading’. His o...
Read Essay
Why My Mother Was Frightened of Cats (Written 1956, published in The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose, 2010)
1956
Despite her affinity with feline independence, intelligence and elegance, West owned a cat only late in life and this arch but tender piece is the result. Full of gentle, ...
Read Essay
What you can do with a hat… (In The Ongoing Moment, 2005, c.pp104-115)
2005
Dyer tells the story of the Great Depression by looking at photographs of men’s hats. An author of far more stand-alone essays than most, this is in fact an excerpt – a brillia...
Read Essay
We Refugees (collected in Hannah Arendt: The Jew as Pariah)
1943
A diatribe carved out of such dry irony that the reader feels its case almost viscerally. After discussing the stigmatisation of the term ‘refugee’, Arendt then exam...
Read Essay
Walking (First published posthumously in The Atlantic Monthly, June 1862)
1862
Aiming ‘to speak a word for Nature’, this essay saunters and surveys, with playful lateral logic. Thoreau’s wide-ranging allusions raise the piece above the spontaneous musin...
Read Essay
Urne Buriall: Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk
1658
Prompted by 40-50 Roman burial urns unearthed in Norfolk, this five-part essay is mainly a survey of historical burial customs, ending with a moving, baroque meditation on mortalit...
Read Essay
Tradition and the Individual Talent
1919
Three years before The Waste Land, Eliot defends and gives critical language to his methods. Written in the tone of one skewering punier contemporary thinkers, Eliot redefines tra...
Read Essay
Toys (Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers)
1973
More specifically ‘French toys’, this short essay remarks on the way French children are only supplied with playthings that are miniaturised items from the adult world, complet...
Read Essay
Think/Classify (First published in Le Genre humain, 1982, and reprinted, in English, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1997)
1982
This darkly humorous, postmodern essay of fragments by a popular OuLiPo author (whose day-job was as an archivist) starts with a ‘Summary’ of its eclectic subsections that suff...
Read Essay
The Venetian Pariah (Le Séquestré de Venise, originally published in Les Temps Modernes, No.141, 1957, and reprinted in English in Situations, IV, trans. Benita Eisler, 1963)
1957
De Beauvoir said this piece, at the aesthetic end of Sartre’s spectrum, was to be a book-length study of the Renaissance painter Tintoretto, foreshortened because Sartre disliked...
Read Essay
The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (subtitled ‘Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution, February 4th and 11th, 1884’)
1884
The subject is literal: cloud phenomena Ruskin observed over the course of fifty years. This very peculiar essay begins by describing normal weather formations, then argues that th...
Read Essay
The Spectator No.50 [on the visit of the Iroquois]
1711
Based on an idea ‘stolen’ from conversation with Jonathan Swift and prefiguring Swift’s later satire – a kind of inverted Gulliver’s Travels. The previous April, four...
Read Essay
The Spectator No.454 [on roving in London]
1712
After an opening declaration on the pleasures of detached, essayistic observation, or ‘spectating’, Steele describes coming from Richmond for a 24-hour ramble through central L...
Read Essay
The Spectator No. 538 [on gastronomic antipathies]
1712
Demonstrating the English periodical essay’s origins in clubbable conversation, and recurring concern with ‘good taste’, Addison describes friends discussing their food avers...
Read Essay
The Soccer War (Wojna futbolowa, 1978, and trans. William Brand, Granta Books, 1990)
1978
Kapuscinski presents himself as a hapless ‘amateur’ reporting to Warsaw on Latin American politics, for whom the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador, following an escalat...
Read Essay
The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination (in Quarrel & Quandary)
2000
An essay about how the ‘broken umbrella of contemporary relativism’ does not change the essentially different aims of history (that which is owed to reality) and imagination (p...
Read Essay
The Rambler No.135 (on the folly of annual retreats to the country)
1751
Embarking from Aristotle’s observation that man is ‘an imitative being’, Johnson attacks the fashion for retiring to the country for the summer as either mindless imitation o...
Read Essay
The Rambler No.117 (on the advantages of living in a garret)
1751
Referring to the bravery of bringing forward new ideas, Johnson makes the mock-heroic announcement that he is introducing new theories on ‘the garret’, mighty subject though it...
Read Essay
The Privileges [of 10th April 1840] (Fragment inédit de Stendhal, 1861, and reprinted in Memoirs of an Egoist, trans. Andrew Brown, 2003)
1861
Written at 57, two years before his death, this is the novelist’s fantasy wish-list in the format of an international treaty. Article 1 demands a good death, but, by Art...
Read Essay
The Painter of Modern Life
1863
A string of eleven mini-essays praising the artist Constantin Guys for seeking ‘the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life’ in almost journalistic watercolour sketches, ...
Read Essay
The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942, and trans. Justin O’Brien, 1955)
1942
A long essay with four chapters (and an appendix on Kafka), asking whether the realisation that life is meaningless requires suicide. Camus defines absurdity as man’s rationality...
Read Essay
The Metropolis and Mental Life (Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben, 1903, and trans. Kurt H. Wolff in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 1950)
1903
This precursor of urban sociology analyses metropolitan life’s impact on the personality. Throughout history, Simmel sees people resisting ‘being leveled down and worn out by a...
Read Essay
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (The London Review of Books, 1983, and collected in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, 1985)
1983
A neurological case-study of ‘visual agnosia’, written in the accessible, urbane style that made the book a bestseller. The reader journeys through Dr Sacks’ bizarre examinat...
Read Essay
The Little Virtues (Le piccolo virtu, written 1960, published in Nuovi Argomenti, and reprinted in her collection named after this essay, trans. Dick Davis, 1985)
1960
Written in the inclusive pronoun (‘We’), yet sometimes asserting singularity (‘Now I believe…’), Ginzburg lectures movingly on the error of teaching children little, risk...
Read Essay
The Hedgehog and the Fox
1953
Berlin takes the Ancient Greek fragment stating that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ as an entertaining basis for dividing thinkers into hedge...
Read Essay
The English Mail-Coach (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine)
1849
A long essay that gallops around de Quincey’s nostalgia for riding on the mail-coaches when an Oxford student, with a tour-de-force at its core where he narrates a near-collisi...
Read Essay
The English Aristocracy (Encounter)
1955
It is unjust that this astute analysis is best known for the ‘tease’ of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ linguistic demarcations between the upper middle class and those below. The essa...
Read Essay
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon, originally published in Die Revolution, 1852, and in English translation in 1869)
1852
The ‘18th Brumaire’ was the day in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte made himself dictator, and here Marx compares this coup with that of Bonaparte’s nephew on 2 December 1851, a...
Read Essay
The Eggman and the Fairies (First published in The Twentieth Century, July 1960, and collected in Escape from the Anthill, 1986)
1960
Butler locates this essay in his own backyard – Tipperary’s hill of Slievenaman – and talks as if we are his neighbours, who already know local Irish legends well. H...
Read Essay
The Duke in his Domain (The New Yorker)
1957
Capote’s profile of Marlon Brando is framed by an evening in a Kyoto hotel when Brando was filming on location. Aside from Peter-Selleresque racisms, the tone is beautifully judg...
Read Essay
The Decay of Lying – An Observation (Intentions, 1891)
1891
A mock-Socratic dialogue, in which ‘Vivian’ reads ‘Cyril’ highlights from a longer article. Vivian argues that Art expresses only itself and serves no other end, while Life...
Read Essay
The Cinema (Arts, New York, June 1926)
1926
A piece both prophetic and self-consciously of its time. Woolf begins disparagingly: the art of making movies is still too young and banal; we are savages knocking together saxopho...
Read Essay
The Bitter Smell of Tulips (Still Life with a Bridle [Martwa natura z wędzidłem])
1993
An acclaimed Polish poet portrays the ‘tulipomania’ that seized the Netherlands in the seventeenth century as exemplary of all ‘follies in the sanctuaries of reason’. ...
Read Essay
The Assassination of Paris (People and Places, 1985, and reprinted in Paris and Elsewhere, ed. David Gilmour, 1998)
1985
Not so much a book review as a book abridgement, the historian Richard Cobb adds his own passionate style and personal observations to the, presumably drier, Yale research of one P...
Read Essay
The Art of Donald McGill
1941
Orwell was one of the first critics to take popular culture seriously – in this case, British seaside postcards showing vulgar, illustrated jokes (produced by McGill). H...
Read Essay
The Anger of the Damned (written October 2001, and reprinted in Striking Terror: America’s New War, 2002, trans. Mary Isin)
2002
An example of how the personal essay form can be used to say something both more simple and profound than any amount of in-depth commentary by political journalists. Start...
Read Essay
Supplementary Observations on the Voyage of Bougainville, or, A dialogue between A and B on the inexpediency of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions which have nothing to do with them
1772
(‘Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou dialogue entre A et B sur l'inconvénient d'attacher des idées morales à certaines actions physiques qui n'en comportent pas’) ...
Read Essay
Stable/Unstable (Originally published in the Turin paper La Stampa, and in English in Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, 1989)
1989
An elegant, short essay by Levi the scientist, rather than Levi the Auschwitz survivor, which nonetheless turns to subtle metaphor at the end and so speaks to the stable/unstable n...
Read Essay
Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity (1982, reprinted in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985)
1982
Wrenched from Rich’s multiple identities (a Jewish lesbian ‘raised to be a heterosexual gentile’), this is prose elaboration upon one line of her early poetry. It de...
Read Essay
Some Blind Alleys: A Letter (Originally published in French in La tentation d’exister, 1956, and in English translation in The Temptation to Exist, 1968 and 1987 Quartet edition with an introduction by Susan Sontag)
1956
A Romanian intellectual discourages an aspiring author. Intending to shock, Cioran spews vitriol over the twentieth century addiction to confessional, therapeutic self-expression, ...
Read Essay
Six to Eight Black Men (collected in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, 2004, and in Holidays on Ice, 1997 and 2008)
1997
America’s most popular living essayist, Sedaris begins this hilarious piece on cultural idiosyncrasies with the small-talk he makes in new places. One of his regular ope...
Read Essay
Reflections on Gandhi
1949
Inspired by Gandhi’s autobiography, this is one great ethical thinker reflecting on another. Orwell measures Gandhi in accessible terms based on biographical detail, then moves o...
Read Essay
On Tickling (in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life)
1993
In this compact essay, which remains an unanswered enquiry more than most ‘essais’, an esteemed analyst of children wonders that the childhood experience of being tickled by a ...
Read Essay
On Thinking for Yourself (Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine philosophische Schriften, 1851)
1851
A sardonic essay in twelve short aphoristic sections, in which Schopenhauer emphasizes the differences between scholars and thinkers. Ultimately it is only our own ideas t...
Read Essay
On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (First published in Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1874, and reprinted in Untimely Meditations, 1997, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R.J. Hollingdale)
1874
Germany’s first modern essayist attacks his culture’s ‘oversaturation’ in historicism and Hegel in a ‘treatise’ of engaging playfulness – for example, the comparison ...
Read Essay
On the Use of Reason by Irrational Animals (Moralia, vol.12, 46-127 as date unknown)
127
Plutarch uses Homer’s Odysseus to dramatize a first-century debate about consciousness and character. Odysseus is trying to get his compatriots turned back from pigs into men by ...
Read Essay
On the Subjection of Women (1860-1, published 1869)
1869
Possibly co-authored by his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, this is a boat-rocking attack on the socio-legal inequalities imposed on Victorian women. The argument aims not solely to bene...
Read Essay
On the Pleasure of Hating (The Plain Speaker)
1826
Hazlitt’s antipathy for a spider prompts reflection on how we can suppress violent actions but not instincts. This quickly escalates to an attack on the religious pretexts for wa...
Read Essay
On the Lame (Book III, Essay 11, 1580-95)
1595
An essay that combines Montaigne’s review of what it was like to have sex with a lame woman with the profound theme of mankind’s tendency to self-deception. It begins,...
Read Essay
On the Cannibals (Book I, Essay 31, 1580-95)
1595
Montaigne’s relativism recognizes that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to’; if the Tupinambá tribesmen of Brazil are ‘savages’, so are European ...
Read Essay
On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature (Titled ‘Artificial Taste’ in Monthly Magazine, April 1797, and reprinted under the present title in her Posthumous Works, ed. William Godwin, 1798)
1797
A year before Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wollstonecraft defines the Romantic Poet. Beginning like a periodical piece, laughing at how city people go to the country but don...
Read Essay
On Old Age (De Senectute)
-45
The 84-year-old author, using Marcus Cato as narrator, and playing wittily with the allowances made for elderly garrulity and digression, advises us to trust Nature’s wisdom, ada...
Read Essay
On Marionette Theatre
1810
Dramatised as a dialogue between friends on a park bench in 1801, this essay is about far more than puppets, though they are discussed with more seriousness than a mere starting-po...
Read Essay
On Lying Fallow: An Aspect of Leisure (International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Vol. 6, 1977)
1977
A clinical paper that reads as an elegant essay despite its professional vocabulary, relevant to every writer or artist who claims that staring out the window is working. ...
Read Essay
On Keeping a Notebook (1966, and collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)
1966
Full of puzzlement at cryptic jottings in her old notebooks, and the film-clip memories they eventually trigger, Didion’s essay is a meditation on modern consciousness, how to ha...
Read Essay
On Clemency (De Clementia, 56AD, and reprinted with English translation and full scholarly paraphernalia in OUP edition, ed. Susanna Braund, 2009 )
56
Seneca’s profound understanding of the psychology of State terror makes this more than standard advice literature, going beyond ‘clemency’ strictly defined into a...
Read Essay
On Being an American (Prejudices, Third Series)
1922
The ‘Sage of Baltimore’ begins with hyperbolic condemnation of the American government, courts, foreign policy and people. Yet unlike ‘fugitive Young Intellectuals’, he ask...
Read Essay
Of Superstition (Essay XVII, 1625 edition)
1625
A radical comparison (for its time) between the relative evils of atheism and zealous, materialistic, bigoted, petty religion (‘superstition’). Bacon finds in favourÂ...
Read Essay
Of Going a Journey (January 1822, New Monthly Magazine, and reprinted in Table Talk, Vol. II)
1822
This commences with bald Romanticism – declaring the pleasure of a solitary tromp through nature – but then qualifies itself. Unlike Coleridge, the prickly Hazlitt cannot walk ...
Read Essay
Of Friendship (Essay XXVII, 1625 edition)
1625
Beginning with friendship’s antithesis, the hermit, Bacon warns that a life amid a crowd of acquaintance can be just as empty of true friendship. He exults in the comfor...
Read Essay
Notes on Camp (The Partisan Review, and collected in Against Interpretation)
1964
Sontag modestly called this, her most influential essay, ‘jottings’ because it comprises numbered points, but it is certainly an essay in the experimental sense: testing what i...
Read Essay
My Confession (Partisan Review)
1954
McCarthy mocks the ‘true confessions of reformed Communists’, before describing her own mock-heroic journey from Vassar college girl to fervent Trotskyite. Though some...
Read Essay
My Books (In two parts: The Literary Examiner, 5 and 12 July 1823)
1823
(Not to be confused with Hunt’s essay-pair also titled 'My Books' in The New Monthly Magazine, September and October 1825) Hunt reminisces in Italy about his cozy English stu...
Read Essay
Mourning and Melancholia (Trauer und Melancholie written 1915, published as scientific paper 1917)
1917
In this milestone in psychoanalytical thought Freud contrasts ‘normal’ mourning (not only for a loved-one’s death, though note the essay’s date, but also for lost ideals) t...
Read Essay
Miles Apart (1961, and collected in Profiles, ed. Ernie Eban, 1990)
1961
This profile of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis begins with musical history and critique, then describes ‘Miles in the flesh’: his extreme egotism and disdain for the British, yet t...
Read Essay
Less Than One (1976, reprinted in his eponymous collection of essays)
1976
A Russian memoir in English that refuses the usual life-story linearity or hierarchies: ‘To get a low grade, to operate a milling machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or...
Read Essay
Leonardo da Vinci
1869
A biographical and critical essay of a style that would be considered unacceptably impressionistic and rhapsodic today, but which retains the ‘air of truth’ despite all the int...
Read Essay
Laughter (first collected in And Even Now)
1920
After a charmingly self-deprecating start, Beerbohm’s very British difficulties coping with theory and philosophy lead him to achieve what Bergson could not: an essay on laughter...
Read Essay
Junkspace (Collected in S, M, L, XL, 1995, and also reprinted in October, Spring 2002)
1995
Despite an early definition (‘If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.’), this essay is as disorient...
Read Essay
J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time (Written 1910, published 1911)
1911
Yeats’ tribute to his dead friend opens dramatically with the riots that greeted Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Yeats argues against picturesque, trivial or declamatory...
Read Essay
Human Personality (La Personnalité humaine, le juste et l’injuste, 1943, published posthumously in La Table Ronde, December 1950, and in English as ‘The Fallacy of Human Rights’ in The Twentieth Century, 1959. Reprinted in Selected Essays: 1934-43, trans. Richard Rees)
1943
Distinguishing between the soul’s cry ‘Why am I being hurt?’ and the superficial cry ‘Why has somebody else got more than I have?’, Weil argues that the best society is a...
Read Essay
How To Write About Africa (Granta 92, The View From Africa)
2005
Originating in a fiercely satirical protest sent by a Kenyan-born author to the editors of Granta, this essay has turned Wainaina into the unofficial ‘censor’ of white writing...
Read Essay
Finding (Antaeus, and reprinted in The Geography of the Imagination, 1981)
1981
A critic writes with tenderness about his Appalachian childhood Sundays spent foraging with his father for Native American arrowheads. He then made no connection between t...
Read Essay
Field (1971, reprinted in About Looking, 1980, and Selected Essays ed. Geoff Dyer, 2001)
1971
An essay resisting paraphrase as it attempts to define an experience ‘seldom referred to only because it is nameless’. It begins with poetic description of how a momen...
Read Essay
Experience
1844
Emerson finds himself standing halfway up some stairs; an image of personal disorientation in middle age and an allegory for Life. He writes with wit and candour about procrastinat...
Read Essay
Essay on Epitaphs (The Friend)
1810
The essay in which Wordsworth uttered the Romantic Biographer’s credo: that commemoration is ‘truth hallowed by love’, truth ‘of the highest order’, even if it glosses ov...
Read Essay
E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction (Written 1990, published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993, and reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997)
1993
The most intellectual yet unpretentious essay on the cultural impact of television – a crater so huge we forget we stand in it. Foster Wallace begins with a Walter Benjaminesque ...
Read Essay
Down With Dons (The New Review, Vol. 1, No.10)
1975
An Oxford don considers what his colleagues might look like, collectively, to a ‘non-don’, in terms of arrogance, bumptiousness, insolence, economic parasitism, hypocritical li...
Read Essay
Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind (New Yorker, and reprinted in The Fire Next Time)
1963
Baldwin wrote this long essay amidst the Civil Rights Movement, but it speaks forcefully to post-9/11 preoccupations. Structured around two autobiographical passages – h...
Read Essay
Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, or ‘The Second Discourse’, written 1754, published 1755)
1754
Answering the Academy of Dijon’s question ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural Law’, this essay acknowledges natural physi...
Read Essay
Days of Reading (La Renaissance latine)
1905
Note: Another Proust essay of the same title, designated ‘Days of Reading II’ by Penguin Classics, was published in Le Figaro in 1907; the latter mostly concerns the marve...
Read Essay
Darwin’s Sea Change, or Five Years at the Captain’s Table (Originally written for Natural History Magazine and collected in Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, 1978)
1978
Gould was an influential evolutionary biologist interested in Darwin’s purposeless, materialistic worldview as an answer to man’s ongoing cosmic arrogance. This essay, however,...
Read Essay
Conversation about Dante (Written sometime during 1933-5 but not published until 1967. Trans. by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes as ‘Talking about Dante’ in Delos, no.6, 1971, and collected in Mandelstam: Selected Essays, ed. Sidney Monas.)
1933
Composed under Stalinist persecution, this is a statement of Mandelstam’s own poetics and of Dante viewed through a Russian lens: ‘If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly...
Read Essay
Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, first published in French in 1834 and then in censored German the following year. Recent English edition published by CUP, ed. Terry Pinkard, 2007)
1834
An exiled poet who knew the leading thinkers of his generation discusses the subject as labeled on the tin, though with more idiosyncrasy and a great deal more irony than that labe...
Read Essay
Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, on the following interesting subjects
1776
‘It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting…’ (G.M.Trevelyan). This anonymous pamphlet’s rad...
Read Essay
Circles
1841
Water’s concentric circles are ‘the highest emblem’ in the world’s ‘cipher’ since all life is, read rightly, cyclical. An affirmative essay, it contains one huge doubt:...
Read Essay
Can the Devil be Saved? (Modernity on Endless Trial, 1990)
1990
The title catchily paraphrases: ‘Can the cosmic and historical drama be interpreted as a movement towards the ultimate reconciliation of all things?’ This is not simpl...
Read Essay
Biathanatos (First published under the title ‘John Donne, Biathanatos’, Sur no.159, January 1948, and reprinted in Otras inquisiciones)
1948
Biathanatos is a treatise by the poet John Donne with the subtitle ‘That Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise’. Borges, following De Quince...
Read Essay
At Table and In Bed (1971, and reprinted in Convergences, trans. Helen Lane, 1987)
1971
Paz essays usually make historical approaches, but here he approaches the United States as subject through a Utopia, that of Fourier, involving perspectives of ‘Erotics and Gastr...
Read Essay
An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (Beantwortung der Frage: ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ 1784, and available in Penguin Great Ideas Series, No.68, translated by H.B. Nisbet)
1784
A prototype for bloggers philosophizing in their pyjamas, Kant’s influential essay responded to a question posed to ‘the public’ in a Berlin journal. Its first sent...
Read Essay
An American in London (Partisan Review, 1949, and collected in the Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Essays)
1949
Connolly uses a fictional-hypothetical character, a young American novelist he calls Bisbee, to view post-war London and its ‘shabby’ yet seductive literary world through cold,...
Read Essay
An Account of My Hut (Hojoki)
1212
The pre-eminent example of Japanese ‘recluse literature’ and part of the ‘zuihitsu’ genre (personal essays and prose fragments, usually responding to the writer’s surro...
Read Essay
A Plea for Gas Lamps (1878, collected in Virginibus Puerisque, 1881)
1878
A well-wrought ‘illumination’ on how our material environment determines culture, habits and happiness. Stevenson re-imagines the city before public lighting, each man...
Read Essay
A Piece of Chalk
1908
Chesterton decides to sketch on the Sussex downs, prompting a lightly comic encounter with a housekeeper about obtaining brown paper and a digression on pocket contents. H...
Read Essay
A Modest Proposal for Preventing Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
1729
This is an anti-colonialist satire, in the style of Juvenal or Tertullian, sarcastically suggesting that the solution to Irish poverty is for the Catholics to sell their children a...
Read Essay
A Letter (Ein Brief, 1902, collected in The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, ed. John Banville, trans. Joel Rotenberg, 2005)
1902
While clearly fictional – this ‘letter’ purports to be sent in 1603 from the English Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon – this nonetheless merits categorization as an essay beca...
Read Essay
A Defence of Poetry (Written 1821, first published posthumously in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mary Shelley, 1840)
1821
Written in answer to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ (1820), this begins as a treatise of ‘accurate philosophy’ but, aptly, evolves into ...
Read Essay
A Chapter on Ears (London Magazine, March 1821, and reprinted in Elia, 1823)
1821
After the most extreme example of Lamb’s periphrastic, ironic, Sternean style – ‘those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments and (architecturally speaking) handsome vol...
Read Essay
A Berlin Chronicle (1932, but published only in 1970, from an incomplete manuscript)
1932
To test the power and processes of memory, Benjamin recollects splinters of his childhood and time as a young, pre-First World War revolutionary. But space, the depopulate...
Read Essay
