“... 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 ...”

“... words of English and fifty dollars in my pocket’. In New York, she took in work by Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Yvonne Rainer. Babette Mangolte introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had her: how the phrase just rolls off the wrist. Memories of Ava weren’t enough to warm Roth on winter nights, as the string of candidates for the role of Jane Eyre dwindled to one. ‘Twelve years ago,’ Taylor writes,I saw him through his last love, for a young person less than half his age whose family strongly disapproved of the association and who ...”

“... too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something ...”

“... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...”