“... of the Soviet period, an ideological simulation of reality. Post-Soviet as well as postmodern, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is about both simulation and reality. There are many ways to characterise Red Plenty and the book’s first sentence provides one: ‘This is not a novel.’ Most simply described, it is a cycle of linked short stories offering a ...”

“... during this time, was widely accused of raping a 24-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was later murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy Father, a former principal papal legate at the council, made his teenage rentboy lover a cardinal. It might seem appropriate that the council’s official ...”

“... sure, what do you even say?’ A Twitter account, @BabiesTuam, still tweets their names: Martin Francis Bane, 3 months; Mary Margaret Jordan, 18 months; John Joseph Mills, 5 months. Feeney herself is creative director of the Tuam Oral History Project, an archive of survivor testimonies.This history echoes throughout As You Were. We hear of one pregnant ...”

“... to the Oghuz Turkic tongues spoken from Moldova to China. This privilege was in evidence when Pope Francis chose in April to define the Armenian deportations, kidnappings, rapes and massacres that started in 1915 as a genocide. The Turkish government prefers fine terminological distinctions: what the pope, every Armenian and a great many others call a genocide ...”

“... piratical and disease-ridden coast of Central America. Together with another dynamic and untried young officer, Horatio Nelson, Despard took effective charge of the expedition, capturing a Spanish jungle fort, occupying it throughout the pestilential rainy season and destroying it just as the enemy advanced to reclaim it. Nelson was invalided out and nearly ...”

“... society: but more important, she has somehow got inside her Italian characters, so that when a young Englishwoman appears on the scene she really seems a foreigner and not, as one might expect, the focus of the novel’s consciousness. Imagination is part of the mystery; the other part is pace. This novel seems to impose its own slow pace on the ...”

“... and prodigious energy. In answer to the question ‘What shall I do research on?’ Medawar tells young people to choose an important problem and to become apprenticed to a senior scientist. I was lucky as a young man to find both. The biochemist husband of a cousin of mine tipped me off about the importance of ...”

“... naturalising a host of mythic figments (sphinxes, Gallivespians, mermaids, unicorns). Serinity Young works at the American Museum of Natural History and is a specialist in Tibetan art and artefacts; an earlier book, Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography and Ritual, was also concerned with power and pleasure. Her ...”

“... psychic liberation. There are three reminiscential character-sketches: ‘The Half Brother’ by Francis Wyndham, an account of a black sheep step-brother; ‘Remembrance’ by Susan Boyd, which touches on the subject of a dead grandmother; and ‘Trotsky’s Other Son’ by Carol Singh, a story describing a Marxist who ran a bookshop in a Nottingham slum in ...”

“... anti-semitism was part of the eugenic philosophy which the writer had picked up second-hand from Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, whose public lectures the Fabians were attending in the early 1900s and who, as Parrinder notes, ‘campaigned for eugenic legislation not unlike that in the Third Reich’. It is a crucial point in Parrinder’s line of argument ...”

“... down. Deciding to be a groupie instead, she raced through the LA art and music scenes. ‘In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,’ Earl McGrath, later the president of Rolling Stones Records, said. ‘It’s usually Eve Babitz.’ Ed Ruscha disagreed:Even if she acted like a groupie, though, she never was. Groupies are passive, bounce off whoever ...”

“... been lucky to survive the Revolution. Like Tocqueville he is educated by the family priest. As a young man he becomes a magistrate (like Tocqueville) and engages in much political soul-searching, torn between loyalty to the royalist cause and his growing sympathy for liberal ideas. Like Tocqueville, he witnesses the July Revolution of 1830 and escapes danger ...”

“... biscuits from the same years depict these new products of plenty as both perfect and null, and his young man in a tennis sweater is beautiful and bland in a similar way: the good life of the postwar period as the unexamined life of leisure and sport. Might the doubt raised in such paintings about a reconstructed West Germany extend to its quick embrace of ...”

“... really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re wounded!’ ‘Nay,’ the soldier’s pride ...”

“... of farming out the office to substitutes at a profit. London was no longer infested by unbeneficed young preachers living on their grubby wits. The Morning Post had ceased to be edited by a gang of ‘parsonical banditti’ ever ready to fight duels in Hyde Park. Hunting parsons, shooting parsons and wrestling parsons were becoming figures of the past. To be ...”