“... 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 ...”

“... some real, some fictional, some generic, a pagan pantheon apart from God – the queen, Churchill, James Bond, Bobby Moore, Sid Vicious, Margaret Thatcher; the miner, the Spitfire pilot, the NHS nurse – and sacred spaces, some famous, such as Wembley or Waterloo or Dunkirk, some idealised: the factory, the village, the rural airfield in 1941. Each ...”

“... began as a 16th-century state intervention, an act of internal Scottish colonisation, part of James VI’s attempt to curtail the autonomous power and culture of the Highlands. In 1597 the king and parliament in Edinburgh decided to plant three new towns in the Highlands as bearers of Lowland Scottish values: English against Gaelic, Protestantism against ...”

“... In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty ...”

“... We think​ of immigration as a movement in space, from one country to another. In conventional terms, those who were born in the United States are American; those who were not are immigrants. They were born in another country, in another culture. They bring with them from their homeland certain habits and values, shared assumptions and common experiences – certain prejudices, perhaps ...”

“... When​ his company commander vanished from the front line at the end of 2015, the Ukrainian conscript and novelist Artem Chekh was told he’d deserted and gone over to the enemy. Through the winter Chekh and his comrades were encouraged to believe their captain was a traitor, laughing at them from the line of separatist bunkers opposite their own, lavishly equipped with warm clothes by his new Russian friends ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... I went​  travelling in Remainia. My aim was to write about St Albans in Hertfordshire, a city just north of London where voters and the local MP are out of sync on the wedge issue of the day. In 2016 the people of St Albans voted heavily to remain in the EU – among cities, St Albans was behind only Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote share ...”

“... Idea​ for a writer’s retreat: a Russian manor house, hundreds of miles from the bright lights of St Petersburg or Moscow. You can only get there by horse. Don’t go in spring or autumn: the road’s nothing but mud then. You might do the trip in three or four days in summer, or, even better, by sledge in winter, when the frost has hardened the ruts and the snow has smoothed the way ...”

“... We find​ ourselves in a fantastical place: deep in the mire of post-Brexit politics before Brexit has happened. Brexit used to be about leaving the European Union. The contest for the Tory leadership, just drawing to a close as I write, has been a glaring signal that quitting the EU may not be the referendum’s gravest outcome. In the past three years the meaning of Brexit has shifted ...”

“... Athens, 9 November. Voula is a smart district of Athens for rich citizens who want to live by the sea. Sleek white apartment blocks with big balconies face the Aegean, which undulates like a lake of mercury under a cool grey sky. Set some way back from the coast is the local public hospital, Asklepieia Voulas, made up of low-rise buildings of plastered brick spread out among grass and trees and partly unmetalled tracks ...”

“... The​ Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s were able to temper regret at the collapse of the USSR with their own knowledge of the dismembered country’s shortcomings. A generation later, this is less and less the case. Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians and Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of Soviet life and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved abroad, gone into a small business or been intimidated: in any case they have been taken out of the political arena ...”

“... Though​ Barbara Walter frames her book as a warning to America, her staccato forays into recent civil wars in dozens of countries only gradually accustom the reader to her habit, after recounting a number of fratricidal horrors, of pointing a dreadful finger at the United States. Beware! You too may one day poke your cellphone through the curtains to film shaky clips of fires and explosions on the horizon of your suburb, it may be your feet crunching on the bloodied glass of a bombed café, it may be your loved one taken away by masked good old boys with customised AR-15s, death’s head armbands and Ford F-150 technicals ...”

“... people don’t understand that shooting and conservation goes together.’Watch a short film of James Meek going wildfowling with DeWayne Cross in 2021, when he was researching this piece.Some redshanks flew over shrilly. There were shots in the distance. One of Cross’s friends was working another part of the marsh. Cross raised his shotgun and, with ...”

“... The second episode​ of season four of Mad Men opens in 1964, somewhere in New York State. Luxurious flakes of snow fall on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby ...”