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“... In the slow weeks before the Taliban fled Kabul, weeks of B-52 vapour trails drawn across blank blue skies, of sporadic bombing and constant rumour, it was easy to find General Abdul Basir. He kept open house in his office, a small, single-storey building at the mouth of the Salang Valley. Bare mountains crowded close on every side, shutting out the light ...”

“... Head north from San Francisco on Highway 101, across the Golden Gate Bridge. If you leave the downtown area at around 7.30 in the morning, even with sea fog moving in, you’ll make it to Sebastopol in time for a breakfast stop around 9. Press on west towards the coast and by mid-morning, not far from the lonely petrol station where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the most famous sequence in The Birds, you’ll be at Fort Ross ...”

“... point of view we experience the world, at the smallest remove from the first person ‘I’ – as James Kelman put it, not so much written from a character’s viewpoint as over his shoulder. In a writer like Kelman, Bellow or Coetzee, it’s a means to great work. Used as a default by less accomplished writers, the single-perspective free indirect speech ...”

“... The opening story in James Kelman’s 1998 collection, The Good Times, is called ‘Joe Laughed’. It’s nine pages long and is told from the point of view of a boy who plays football on a patch of waste ground among derelict industrial buildings by the river in a large, unnamed city which British readers are bound to assume is Glasgow ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen​ has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the retrograde, of revival of old forms or subject matter. Published at the turn of the millennium, The Corrections is a work of its time, not for its topical themes of dementia, the medicated society or stock market chicanery but for its approach to family ...”

“... Like a single-column photograph in a newspaper, the portrait of Tsar Ivan IV on the dust jacket of Isabel de Madariaga’s book has been cropped down to the essential features: the mournful brown eyes, the long, slightly beaked nose, the plump little mouth nestling in the silver-black whorls of a beard which bleeds out to the edge of the paper. On the inside of the back flap is the caption ...”

“... When Moazzam Begg was kidnapped by the American government and its Pakistani foederati on 31 January 2002 – ‘kidnapped’ appears to be the appropriate legal term to use of Guantánamo Bay prisoners, none of whom has ever been charged, tried or formally designated a POW – he experienced a curious moment of melodrama. Seized from the house where he was staying in Islamabad and dropped in the back of a 4x4, Begg couldn’t help laughing at the atrocious Pakistani disguise of one of the Americans ...”

“... One evening in London in 2004, knots of people – mainly mothers with young children – gathered on the pavement along the northern end of the No. 73 bus route. As the buses clattered through Stoke Newington, their ancient engines straining to accelerate up the slight slope of Albion Road, the children waved. It was the last night the old double-decker Routemaster bus would do duty on the route and the mothers had taken their children out in the dark to bid the machines farewell ...”

“... People​ mistrust originality, especially in politicians. The safe political performance is an enactment of the familiar. The political effort to extend British airstrikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria began in November when David Cameron set out his case to Parliament in relatively decorous terms. By 2 December, when Parliament voted in favour, an older, cruder performance had emerged ...”

“... There’s a scene in Breaking Bad, a third of the way through the 54 episodes shot and screened on US TV so far, that marks a significant moment in the gradual passage of its central character, Walter White, from hero to villain. Walter, a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher who’s become a manufacturer of illegal drugs, is walking down the aisle of a DIY superstore in his home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, buying paint for his basement, when another customer’s laden trolley catches his eye ...”

“... At school, I was taught by a married couple of maths teachers called Mr and Mrs Deas. Little imagination was called for from Mrs Deas. She taught what the Scottish curriculum of the day called ‘arithmetic’. Most of it was easy. I remember one lesson called ‘How to Write a Cheque’. There was no corresponding lesson on ‘How to Cash a Cheque ...”

“... and an old sideboard hand-decorated by my mother. The animal was killed by my great-uncle, Robin Meek, and a local huntsman, Belli, in the Nilgiri hills in southern India in 1931. Originally – that is, when I was a child – the leopard was in two parts, the skin and the head. The skin was backed with felt, the legs splayed out, the claws still ...”

“... in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire that first made Peace’s name. This is a writer who compares St James’s Hospital in Leeds to Dachau. I don’t suppose the now closed Stanley Royd Mental Hospital in Wakefield was a merry place in 1980, but was it really, as Peace described it in Red Riding, ‘an Auschwitz, a Belsen’? Red Riding was published in four ...”

“... What are we saying when we say someone has ‘gone out of their mind’? The thing about going out of your mind is that the mind is still there; you can go back. You haven’t lost your mind. You’ve just gone out of it. The Russians use the same phrase. The Russian adjective meaning ‘crazy’, which is the same as the noun for ‘insane person’, is sumasshedshy, literally ‘who was going out of their mind ...”

“... the ground around it is baked dust. Earlier in the day I’d called an old friend, a photographer, James, who was with a bunch of colleagues from the New York Times in a farmhouse nearby. He’d said they could probably make room. So I call him again and he gives us directions. We find them a few minutes later, sitting on benches round a marble-topped table in ...”