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“... When​ General Valery Zaluzhny, then Ukraine’s senior military commander, spoke in November of a stalemate, it was widely taken in the West as a signal that the war was frozen in all but name: that Ukraine and Russia had reached their fighting limits, that Russia could invade no further and Ukraine could liberate no more. Ukraine’s southern summer counteroffensive had fallen far short of its objective, the city of Melitopol, which would have cut off Russia’s land route to Crimea; it didn’t get even halfway to the consolation goal, the key junction town of Tokmak ...”

“... or Missouri, or Victoria, once homes to the mythical Robin Hood and the real Jesse James and Ned Kelly, no longer are. Still, if we move out from Hobsbawm’s focus on the social bandit as actual individual, and consider the entire Robin Hood myth, the ideal remains familiar in our outlaw-free world. The myth requires a great mass of heavily ...”

“... be gained. It seemed to me that he was wrong. It does make a difference who holds Kherson. Watch James Meek's short film from Mykolaiv.One day​ I took a car west out of Mykolaiv, across the Varvarivsky bridge over the Southern Buh, and down the west bank of the river to the little town of Parutyne. We passed vineyards, sunflower fields, beaches. There ...”

“... On Easter day, I walked down Farringdon Road from Rosebery Avenue, towards Farringdon Station. I intended to make a voyage to one of the planet’s more mysterious realms, the point at which Zone Six of the London Underground’s fare map gives way to Zone A, the point that, for many Londoners, marks the edge of the known world. Unless you happen to live there, of course ...”

“... In the spring​ of 2020, while the world stayed indoors to suppress Covid-19, arsonists attacked mobile phone masts in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. They set fire to nearly a hundred masts in the UK, or tried to; there were twenty attacks over the Easter weekend alone, including one on a mast serving a Birmingham hospital ...”

“... Spy satellites​  used to be the hushest of the hush-hush, but now anyone can order up a picture taken from space. The images released in November by the US firm Maxar of hundreds of Russian army trucks and tanks parked in fields near the Russian town of Yelnya were intended to get attention, but they have the flavour of intelligence. Like screengrabs of CCTV footage showing a crime, or pap shots of celebrities looking sad, they seem to contain both a story and its proof ...”

“... Thanet,​ where Nigel Farage will try to win a Westminster seat at the next election, lies nicely along the axis of his commute between his home in South London and his office at the European Parliament in Brussels. If Kent, cartographically speaking, is England’s right foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe, pointing east into the sea towards Belgium ...”

“... Yevgeny Prigozhin​ , boss of the Russian government’s semi-private, arm’s-length alternative army, Wagner, likes to make videos. In one, he stands on the roof of a building a few miles north of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which Wagner and the Russian army spent weeks trying to capture. Prigozhin has a particular style for these short, social media-optimised clips ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”

“... The first​ big leader to livestream a message to the virtual World Health Assembly on 18 May was supposed to be Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa and chairman of the African Union, but something went wrong with the feed. Xi Jinping went first instead. We saw the president of China seated behind a highly polished table, in front of a mural showing rosy dawn creeping over the Great Wall ...”

“... The approach​ to the main southbound platform at Dundee Station has a sharp curve. People waiting there hear the trains coming before they see them, the noise amplified by the Dock Street tunnel and echoing off the rough red sandstone blocks of the high wall opposite. The small train whose journey will end in Glasgow or Edinburgh pulls in and whines off again ...”

“... The British wrote cheques they could not cash.’ American Special Forces officer In the morning​ , I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance ...”

“... Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues ...”

“... Back​ in 1997, when liberal capitalism bestrode the Atlantic and history had been abolished, morning came with a newspaper. The paper you got depended not just on your taste, but on where you lived: if you were a coastal American, you might get a vast informational department store like the New York Times, the Washington Post or the LA Times, but the great cities in between had their equivalents, from the Chicago Tribune to the Arizona Republic ...”

“... The authorities​ in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy Street ...”