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Obituary | Climb every mountain Nirmal Purja performed momentous feats in the Death Zone

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  Obituary | Climb every mountain Nirmal Purja performed momentous feats in the Death Zone The Gurkha mountaineer and Netflix star died in an avalanche on July 30th, aged 43 Save Share Photograph: Alamy Aug 13th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story AI Narrated H is climbing career was still young when Nirmal Purja went up Dhaulagiri, the seventh-highest peak in the world. He had been born in a village in its foothills, in a house shared with chickens, but the family had moved to Nepal’s lowland south when he was five. So he had barely registered the magnificent wall of rock and snow, 8,167 metres of it, filling the horizon. Now, at 30, he was one of a climbing party toiling across it. He took his turn, of course, at trailblazing. And as he went, plunging knee-high into the snow, he was learning something extraordinary about himself. The altitude didn’t seem to be affecting him. He was strong. Each step arrived with power. Boom! Boom! Boom! Soon, the rest of the party were litt...
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Sebald by The Economist

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  W.G. Sebald A.D. Miller considers the work of W.G. Sebald, reissued by Vintage this Spring Save Share Mar 25th 2011 | 3 min read By A.D. Miller The essential theme of W.G. Sebald’s books is memory: how painful it is to live with, how dangerous it can be to live without it, for both nations and individuals. The narrators of his books—of which “Austerlitz” and the four linked narratives of exile in “The Emigrants” are the most compelling—live in a state of constant reminder. Everything blends into everything else: places, people, their stories and experiences, and above all different times, which seep into each other and blur together, often in long, unmoored passages of reported speech. The narrator of “Vertigo” gives a concise account of this method: “drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order”. Sebald, born in Bavaria in 1944, spent most of his adult life as an academic in Britain. He died in Norfolk in 2001, after havin...
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