“... Asya, the heroine of Michael Ignatieff’s novel of revolution and exile, is born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1900. As a child, she nearly drowns walking out over the thawing ice beneath which the River Vasousa roars. She has a vision there of a great skater. Her brush with death changes her and leaves her with a belief ‘even when fear had her in its clasp ...”

“... than their unseeded quarter-final opponents, they were terrible. Henman called his match against Michael Stich ‘my worst experience on a tennis court’. He couldn’t get a first serve in. He stayed back on the second serve and couldn’t get that in either. He couldn’t return. He missed volleys (against Krajicek he volleyed like Edberg). Even his famed ...”

“... than any of Barthelme’s figures. Tiny Lies is a marvellously buoyant first book of stories by a young Canadian writer resident in London. Pullinger’s feeling for time and place and social context is much sharper as well as a good deal narrower than Donald Barthelme’s. These are highly personal stories, which usually centre on a woman living alone. Some ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... out a cat’s cradle of relationships dating back to her schoolgirl romance with a gifted painter, Michael Stour. Just as the complex pattern of recurrences and continuities imparted a busy, eventful stillness to Thorpe’s novel, so Kicking is oddly but energetically static, its startling overture and pared-down prose driving the reader onward, not into a ...”

“... for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. ‘Half dust, half deity’, Byron wrote of man’s estate, but I applied his meaning more specifically. ‘Alike unfit to sink or soar’ seemed to describe that hanging space, a few feet off the ground, in which Jordan lived. Jordan has presided ...”

“... dead, Your wife, your child? Ros Schwartz is quoting here from a selection of Sachs in English by Michael Hamburger and others, whereas when it comes to rendering from Vietnamese, she offers the original transliterated, and then, working closely with Gansel, translates from her French versions, thereby forging a powerful echo chamber (even two steps removed ...”

“... important ‘in a country which has no compulsory military service’ if the physique of young shop assistants is to be safeguarded. And preferably such young men and others – ‘cabmen, carters and peasants’, for example – ought to be formed, under the superintendence of the gentry, into corps of civilian ...”

“... and galleries; or the Empire gets reimagined as an indulgence merely of the English. Yet, as Michael Fry argues in this vast, contentious volume, alongside the Reformation, the Treaty of Union and the Enlightenment, Empire was ‘one of the great formative experiences’ in Scotland’s past. The Scottish Empire is a remarkable book that could probably ...”

“... him a visibility at odds with the solitude and simplicity he craved. One reason he moved with his young family from Belfast to Glanmore in County Wicklow in 1972 was to protect himself from what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical ...”

“... subjects) with his stubbly, slightly stooping distrust of the camera. The curled and freckled Mr Michael Rooney, who in his smock and kerchief seems to look at us straight out of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph from the 1860s. The long-necked poise of Mrs Barbara Hyslop, the intimate textures of dark hair and fine wool. Much like the portrait sitters for ...”

“... suddenly they are made to join the daily grind of 21st-century pedagogy. As the parent of young children, I wasn’t alone in feeling perturbed by the relentlessness of the daily maths and literacy classes, and by the rote manner in which English – or literacy, rather – is taught, with sentences treated like exotic gadgets to be operated with the ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... But he is in danger of doing so. Single, and sexually active, he takes part with the other young people of the district in the courtship and mating rituals which lead, willingly or not, to the married state in which Gilbert, like Aaron, is likely to feel blocked and negated. The upshot of the first part of the novel is that Gilbert Noon is very nearly ...”

“... an officer called Odoacer killed his former colleague Orestes in battle and deposed Orestes’ young son, made emperor barely a year before. The boy was sent into retirement, lucky to be alive, and the poignant irony of his name – Romulus Augustulus, ‘the little emperor’ – has proved impossible for posterity to resist: 476, the year he was ...”