“... 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 ...”

“... Iris Hawkins​, the resourceful heroine of Francis Spufford’s fourth novel, Nonesuch, wants ‘to be in the room where the decisions are taken’. No small ask in 1930s Britain. She has followed her father into the City, leaving Watford, if not its vowels, behind. She works as a secretary at the brokerage Cornellis & Blome, typing letters, opening the post, operating the teleprinter (she’s the only one who knows how) and delivering printouts of orders to the brokers’ room ...”

“... a roughly ten-year cycle, another assessment came due in 1996 and the old material was viewed by Francis Spufford in his eloquent I May Be Some Time with less animus and a more historically minded cultural analysis, mellowing the harshness of the previous ruling. Scott was perhaps a child of the Romantics, a son of the Sublime, a victim of the need for ...”

“... traditionally offered a way for both children and adults to imagine their fundamental aloneness. Francis Spufford writes that, among the Hopi people of the American South-West, it is impossible to be an orphan. No child could slip through the net of family bond: if parents die, a grandparent, aunt, third cousin, someone will step in to fulfil that ...”

“... I am on my cosy sofa, about to have my snooze. ‘One is there in imagination as one reads,’ as Francis Spufford puts it in I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996). ‘But with the possibility of instant withdrawal; one feels for the human figures at the centre of the scene, but one is not exactly in sympathy with them, though it is ...”