“... the Edinburgh Festival, religion, childhood, Marxism, bicycles, and the Army in the Second World War. The ‘Notes on Authors’ give a range of ages, occupations and habitations. The stories are so arranged as to bring forward analogies of subject that focus in several instances considerable differences of treatment. Oliver Sacks’s stirring ‘The ...”

“... all those years they were never separated for more than a few weeks at a time. The outbreak of war caught Nijinska in Russia, where she had gone to await the birth of her first child. Nijinsky was in the West. She did not see him again until 1921, by which time he had become incurably insane. Both the Nijinsky parents were Polish and had graduated from the ...”

“... The Warriors of Hsienyang Clay-imaged warriors drilling in the sand Stand ready to be inspected by war. The kneeling archer has a lethal eye: The deft fingers of the charioteer Contain his mischievous horses as they shy. The sergeant bullshits to belie his fear. The browned-off soldiers waiting for commands Are ready to fight but disinclined to die. Rank upon ...”

“... have already been amply described. I remember my English master, twenty-five years ago, asking our class provokingly, ‘But what happens when Ted Hughes runs out of animals?’, and even among devoted Rothites there has been a tendency over the last couple of novels to greet Nathan’s regular reappearance with a mild resignation bordering on surliness. But ...”

“... restaurant in suburban Petersburg (Ozerki, 20 minutes by train from the Sestroretsk station, first-class fare 25 copecks) behind whose dark veil – the veil of Isis – he sees ‘the enchanted shore/And the enchanted distance’. Lyuba, too, began to experiment: ‘I was delivered to the will of anyone who courted me with assiduity.’ Andrey Bely, the ...”

“... by the Russians. The consequence of the democrats’ failure to produce a coherent ruling class, a failure compounded by the lack of any obvious economic success, is a political vacuum into which some force must step, probably sooner rather than later. It seems increasingly the case that the best one can and should hope for is not a deepening of the ...”

“... spread into the squares and boulevards of northern areas, a sign that a less economically battered class is now also participating. In girls’ schools, the courage to scrawl a slogan on the blackboard is spreading to younger groups. Headteachers have been told to release girls one by one after school, in order to discourage gatherings and make it easier to ...”

“... the earth’s uncultivated land, plus one third of its mineral riches. The aftermath of the Cold War allowed Beijing to come in with a low bid for Africa. In the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of bipolar politics, the West withdrew from the continent. Washington, London and even Paris, once a thriving postcolonial ...”

“... world at bay’. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, her university class was conscripted for a year ‘to prevent future insubordination’. A blurry photocopy of Gone with the Wind circulated among her peers, but Li read differently from the other recruits. ‘I did not see myself in Scarlett O’Hara … To read oneself into ...”

“... a week – a regime which, he said, with statistical justification only, would enable one to write War and Peace every year. The drink and the misery of his first wife (who is with distressing regularity described as ‘awful’ by the witnesses Biswell quotes) ended with her death from liver failure in 1968: a crate of gin was, it’s said, delivered to their ...”

“... and events’. Clio uses her contribution to the exercise to prove her point. On her way to the class that morning, she passed a music college with an open window from which she could hear a pianist practising the D minor fugue from Bach’s French Suites. Remembering how, a couple of years earlier, she had ‘for a number of reasons’ given up her own ...”

“... of the Labour Party as an increasingly abusive marriage between a salt-of-the-earth, working-class dad, with his lived experiences and solid values, and an educated middle-class mum, with her good intentions and upwardly mobile aspirations. Not only is this touchingly politically incorrect, it’s also slightly ...”

“... was decrepit and the Catholic beast rampant again. When Froude was born, in 1818, the long cold war between Britain and Rome was rapidly thawing and a portrait of the pope was hanging in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor. In the 1820s, British Catholics were admitted first to public corporations and crown offices, then to Parliament itself: no longer ...”

“... Cage Sr, an inventor, had been bankrupted trying to develop a submarine for use in the First World War; an accident sustained while working for an aircraft company, in which he lost the full use of one of his arms, compounded the disappointment. John Jr started school under a cloud. He was bullied so badly that his parents were forced to transfer him to an ...”

“... of seven books of fiction and non-fiction. A first novel, Ugly Rumours, a tale of the Vietnam War, appeared in Britain in 1975 but is always omitted from his list of publications. To read it is to understand why: the book is a simplistic, moralising mess. Wolff’s pair of protagonists, a Special Forces lieutenant and an Army sergeant, are two-dimensional ...”