“... an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his ...”

“... ethics survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a ...”

“... exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel ...”

“... his last Ode, ‘To Autumn’ (which in effect brought his creative life to an end – in the winter that followed, fatal illness declared itself), there is a comparable but more direct reservation. Keats wrote: ‘Some think I have lost that poetic ardour and fire ’tis said I once had – the fact is perhaps I have.’ This element of serious doubt ...”

“... the Customs in Pakhoi as an agency of Nanking from which it stood to gain nothing. By the late winter, Stella’s health was worsening again. ‘I am wondering now if I have not come to the end,’ she wrote: ‘I do not really mind. I have come to my full stature, such as it is, and do not feel that anything very valuable would be cut off untried by my ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... of Giovanni’s Room in 1956, James Baldwin travelled to the South to write about race. In the winter of 1959 his essay ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ appeared in Partisan Review. ‘In the fall of last year,’ he wrote, my plane hovered over the rust-red earth of Georgia. I was past thirty, and I had never seen this land before. I pressed my face against ...”

“... interest rates on student loans figured among the main grievances in demonstrations throughout the winter. And the Occupy movement in the US – whose slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent,’ was reportedly first floated by Graeber himself – has condemned not only the maldistribution of wealth but the related vice of massive consumer debt, in the form of ...”

“... Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close attention from a child protection unit. All very saccharine, morbid and outmoded – until the disregarded and rundown riverscape was recognised as a prime regeneration ...”

“... States. His evidence includes Native archaeological and material sources such as the Lakota ‘Winter Counts’ – buffalo hides on which they depicted the decisive event of a given year. (A book inhabiting a historical Native point of view still seems to elude contemporary academics. Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country (2001), which ...”

“... production of ‘dream houses of the collective’; at one point Benjamin draws up a list of ‘winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railway stations’, and one could easily add to this from other sections of the book: the Crystal Palace (ground zero of the bourgeois imagination), the Eiffel Tower, the unearthly reading rooms done by ...”

“... state established in 1952. But the way hundreds of thousands stood up against Mubarak last winter was a historic event Egyptians will never forget. The same is true of Tunisia, except that there a revolution has not only toppled Ben Ali but also ended the monopoly of the old ruling party. The Tunisians have entered the unknown. Whether they have the ...”

“... government to introduce the fiscal package that detonated the great French strike-wave of the winter of 1995, and brought him down. It was the corset of the Stability Pact that forced Portugal into slashing social benefits and plunging the country into a steep recession in 2003. The government in Lisbon did not survive either. The notion that today’s EU ...”

“... his apparent surprise at the horror in the Euro-American world that greeted his appointment of Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador – quickly rescinded – was simply the reaction of a man whose lifelong habit has been to isolate health work from all other forms of politics. This attitude might sound cynical, or naive, but it could just as well be seen ...”

“... died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones. Last winter I came back to the same place. It was even colder this time, and the pathways were glittering as I made my way down to the church. I hadn’t taken in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George ...”