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Philip Larkin once wrote, ‘Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, strangeness made sense.’ When I read this book, I was travelling on business, something I was used to doing. I was also dealing with grief.
Keynes’s humanity is palpable, despite the superficially dry subject matter. His fundamental appeal is that we understand ourselves better.
Some philosophy: I think empathy requires common ground. Habermas argues that all moral discourse assumes a core set of principles. In essence, these principles hold that the interests of all affected are given equal weight.
Alexander Masters’ book is a backwards biography of a homeless addict, Stuart Shorter, who lived on the streets of Cambridge. Tellingly, the backwards element was Stuart’s idea.
‘In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood, / for I had lost the right path.’
In Summer 2013, a graduation speech given by the idiosyncratic novelist, short-story genius and children’s author George Saunders went viral.
When I was about twelve years old, me and the other gay kid in my class used to hide in the library. This was partly because he got beaten up a lot and partly so we could photocopy pictures of the movie idols we unfashionably adored at a time when everyone else was into Take That.
Truth and Beauty is lifted above most memoirs by Ann Patchett’s unselfishness; she is writing a book that tells her own story, but frequently steps aside to offer the full spotlight to her friend, the magical, difficult Lucy Grealy, author of ‘Autobiography of a Face.’ Lucy Grealy, who died at th
‘Dear Joe, your wild noisy huge brother/is dead. I couldn’t do what my parents did/bring two boys, four years apart, through the maze.’
A slim memoir of poverty, abuse, agency and power, this story of a young gay survivor growing up in dirt-poor Carolina is only ninety-four pages long.