“... in Petrograd from Finland to trigger off the Revolution. A book recommended by many experts is David Shub’s Lenin: A Biography. It has much to recommend it, not least that Shub was a member of the Bolshevik Party in 1905 when Lenin was its leader and knew him and many other prominent actors in the Revolution very well. But few openings to a novel about ...”

“... published much later in Obscure Destinies. It reflects the poignant discontent of Victoria (the young Willa), living too close to the crowded miseries of an always-pregnant mother, an improvident father, an obediently slavish Southern grandmother. Willie Cather Jr, as she signed herself in her books, yearned to leave for the University of Nebraska, and was ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade ...”

“... uses the word to say what he doesn’t understand about the mild manners of children who die young.                     Murderers are easy to understand. But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is ...”

“... gigantic flying bear, ‘the de facto ruler of our city’. The novel begins when the narrator, a young woman called Rachel, is picking through Mord’s matted fur while he’s asleep, and discovers a strange creature ‘like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid’. She takes the creature home, names him Borne, and teaches him to talk. Feeding on lizards and ...”

“... needs to learn everything. The Cabrini public housing project in Chicago, where Sennett lived as a young boy, gave its inhabitants almost no part to play in decisions about its everyday running. They were managed but not seen, treated as if they couldn’t possibly have any ideas about the structure of their own and other people’s lives – ‘rendered ...”

“... what it was I’d know which direction to go.’ The most eloquent expression of this idea is in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (1991): ‘Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition . . . I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom . . . I want to keep breathing and ...”

“... surely have sighed with impatience at these reactions. ‘Always remember,’ Turner advised a young painter, ‘you can never reach the brilliancy of nature’ – however monochrome, empty, nature seems to be. ‘There is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour,’ Ruskin declared, ‘in which nature does not exhibit colour which no mortal effort can ...”

“... to the designer atheism of the early 21st century, with a nice sideswipe at the pornography of David Attenborough’s nature programmes thrown in:‘Isn’t there something faintly repellent about a posse of cameramen training their sights on a python slowly swallowing an antelope or on a coot killing her surplus ...”

“... has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually accounts for about 11 per cent of the electorate, contributed 18 per cent of the total vote, splitting 66 to 32 in Obama’s favour.) These groups are now the most disillusioned and apathetic, and feel ...”

“... is that ‘attacks on the use of race as a concept’ appear to anti-racist writers like David Roediger as a ‘distressingly new’ critique of anti-racism, all the more unsettling because it comes from the left – which Racecraft does. In her brilliant essay of 1990, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’ (reprinted in ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”

“... frontiers in the making of nations. If Henry of Northumbria had not predeceased his father, King David I of Scotland, in 1152, Britain might have been divided at the Humber into two more equally sized political units, the kingdom of Greater Scotland (incorporating northern England) and the kingdom of Little England (made up of the midlands and south). Not ...”