“... literate of serfs did not have civil rights. ‘People could be bought and sold wholesale or in small numbers, by families or singly like bulls and sheep,’ Nikitenko writes. He is being circumspect. Though he doesn’t excuse the system, and even talks of its ‘corruptive effects’, there is much that he doesn’t say. For the majority of serfs, after ...”

“... quality of self-possession characteristic of McEwen. From left to right they are a broken bud, a small leaf lightly withered, a larger leaf also withered, a piece of bark, three seed pods, a torn branch and a sycamore seed with one wing missing. Writing about another series of leaf paintings, which he titled by the places where they were found rather than by ...”

“... Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton Anthology of English Literature’s supremacy in the American textbook market; and, in the last month of the last century, of the ...”

“... seems to try to render in exact terms. Most contemporary American poetry wants only to offer what Helen Vendler has called ‘an interior state clarified in language’. ‘Clarified’ is an ambiguous word here, meaning the poetry’s effort to achieve the effect of being clear on the page. In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy ...”

“... commonplace and the customary. In Carn, Patrick McCabe describes three decades in the life of a small Irish community. Carn is a small town situated half a mile from the Irish border, a town honoured in Republican annals for the heroism of Commandant Matt Dolan, shot dead in 1922 during a raid on the railway. Dolan has ...”

“... generous proportion of the proceeds to help good causes in the arts; perhaps even make a small but entirely uncalled-for donation to Tony Churt himself. At the moment of this fantasy, Martin doesn’t even know whether the painting is a Bruegel or not, hasn’t shared his guess with Kate, his recently married but long-suffering wife, and is ...”

“... health challenge of asymptomatic Covid-19 transmission. The need for testing was such that our small team was soon on Zoom calls with Silicon Valley startups, the California Covid-19 Testing Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir (the US testing tsar) and the White House task force (two guys sharing a bedsit in San Francisco). We suggested to executives at Apple ...”

“... and moved to the slums. New converts to a ‘simple life’, they tinted the walls of their small house, waxed the uncarpeted floors and improvised furniture, hoping to set an aesthetic example to their neighbours. The drawing-room gatherings and expensive clothes of their former lives now seemed ‘as dross’. On a January morning the following year ...”

“... Bella, who is 17, has recently moved from sunny Arizona to live with her single father in Forks, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, well known, apparently, for its rain and dullness: it’s ‘literally my personal hell on earth’. There, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, one of a small sect who call themselves ...”

“... it is obvious she was very fond of him and regretted the breakdown of her marriage. Her narrator, Helen, says: ‘I dream about Ned, as I am to dream about him for years and years to come. In these dreams he is always angry and I am always sad.’ That summer of 1990, as we drove about East Hampton and Amagansett on our way to swim or shop, Janet would ...”

“... to come forward from the cast of sad sacks. ‘Victory Lap’ is about two teenage neighbours in a small town. Alison, three days short of her 15th birthday, is a Little Miss Perfect who thinks ‘everyone is a rainbow,’ except perhaps her hometown suitors: ‘she felt hopeful that {special one} would hail from far away. The local boys possessed a certain je ...”

“... will be no dancing, no music, no dreaming tonight. There will only be a bollocking. Here, the small scale of the story is its point, its tiny observations a strength. Even more important, it shows no signs of having been written to order. A sense that the writers were not at work with a photocopied manifesto tacked up above their desks marks out the other ...”

“... with The Infinitesimals, in between.) Kasischke’s poems let some of us say about them what Helen Vendler once said about the early books of Adrienne Rich: ‘someone my age was writing down my life.’ Kasischke has chronicled her generation, the generation where wild kids learned to smoke, and then learned, as adults, never to smoke: the memory of ...”

“... allowed to attend university, and has worked – multitasking, in the manner of gifted people in small populations – as a teacher, magazine editor, journalist and screenwriter. Currently she is research director at the Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania, which one wishes for the author’s sake might be a sinecure, but almost certainly ...”

“... shopfronts, but you could walk into the Regal, ‘buy’ a ticket and take a seat in front of a small screen. The transport museum has since been rehoused and the Kelvin Hall is a strange combination of leisure centre and museum collections. When I visited in March, three large folders were waiting for me on a trolley. The earliest documents are from ...”