My morning journey starts in Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury, close to the old house where I live in one of eight tiny bed-sitting rooms.

India is paradoxical. One minute you’re in Paradise, the next minute you’re tumbling head-over-heels into the bowels of the Inferno.

In 1991, my husband and I took up posts at an international school in San Salvador. We brought with us our two children who were both then u

My mother was anxious to fulfill her wifely role and fall pregnant. I imagine her lying in bed, cold and frightened...

As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth month, the author recalls his introduction nearly three decades ago to Europe's last war which...

We’d stayed outside the refugee camp until the early hours of the morning. The camp was huge, with over a thousand refugees

They roll into Coober­ Pedy around midnight, having dis­embarked from the Indian ­Pacific at Port Augusta early that afternoon.

Trying to lose one's maidenhead, when all about you are losing theirs, becomes more complicated than anticipated...

Suffocated by small town life, weary of the frozen tundra of Ithaca, New York winters, I took trips down to Manhattan as often as I...

Living in a seedy youth hostel in Sydney Australia the 1980s, the author visits the labour exchange and finds work making soap and boxes.

Like my Grandma Manda before she married, I was to be a ‘maid of all work’: chambermaid, dish-washer, kitchen hand and laundress.

I am running to my father’s side because he has called me.

Britain, 1988: In a recession, landing a job, any job, is like winning the Lottery and that’s how I felt when the temping agency rang me....

“It’s a tropical paradise, yes, but you must never sleep on the floor there...”

Just before the big flood of 1972 in Rochester, New York, in the wake of Hurricane Agnus, my father moved out of our house for good.

I have named my pain and called it ‘dog’ —Friedrich Nietszche, The Gay Science

I’d never been to Birmingham before and getting off the train at the dimly-lit subterranean station was not an auspicious start to summer.

It was 1963. A blizzard blew across the grass outside the married quarters where we lived in RAF St Athan.

The source of the Actor’s anxiety arrives on the set, his partner in the scene, a male with dangling testicles each the size of grapefruit.

We’d hollow out rock hard swedes with sharp knives. When we lit the stump of a candle inside them, the smell of singed swede was beguiling.