Essays seem to offer almost limitless room to improvise and experiment, and yet their very freedom makes them unforgiving of literary faults: sloppiness, vagueness, pretension, structural misshapenness, an immature voice, insular material, and the nearly universal plague of bad thinking are all mercilessly exposed under the spotlight in which the essayist stands alone onstage. There are no props, no sets, no other actors; the essayist is the existentialist of literature, and a mediocre talent will wear out his audience within a couple of paragraphs - George Packer writing on George Orwell Jolyon Nuttall is anything but a mediocre talent. From Professor Achille Mbembe, widely recognised thinker and writer who has received worldwide acclaim for his contributions to the discourse on Africa: Writing in the first-person singular is one of the few means through which ordinary people can democratically engage with history. In this manuscript, Jolyon Nuttall offers a vivid example of the way one human being organises his experience of time, thinks of the temporal structure of his own actions, encounters and experiences and ultimately curates his own life. In a style of writing whose clarity and precision are unmatched, he gives ordinary people, places and events a name and a face, turning history itself into society's memory. From Denis Beckett, wordsmith, author, columnist: I hardly ever read anything to the end and, if I do, I feel captive. This one took me swimmingly to page The Last. My overall impression is of a life well lived, extremely elegantly told and reassuring us that some things are as they seem to be. From John Conyngham, former Editor of The Witness in Pietermaritzburg: Infused in much of the composite narrative is the joy of being a member of a family, with the inevitable sorrow of loss. His essays on Alan Paton and Lewis Nkosi throw fascinating light on important literary figures and are therefore literary history
