“... 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 ...”

“... who want to farm. Some see their patrimony disintegrate before they have a chance to inherit it. James Lake did. His grandfather started a mushroom-growing business in Hertfordshire and moved it to Little Fransham in Norfolk, a few miles south of the Agnew and Townshend farms and the old airfield, in the 1960s. By the time Lake was born in the 1970s the ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... the developers would have also knocked down the Ancoats Dispensary, from where the epidemiologist James Kay carried out his influential studies of disease among the poor, had a campaign not been mounted to save it. Council house residents who wanted to stay got new homes at social rents; 55 were built for them. A proportion of the 142 flats in the Chips ...”

“... Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist ...”

“... There was​ a corpse on the street where I stayed in Kyiv, among the caryatids, 19th-century tenements and boho joints near the Golden Gate. It was an amiable June day, warm, fresh and cloudless, and most of the living wore bright summer clothes. The paramedics had covered the dead man in a dark grey plastic rubbish sack, cut along the seam to make a rectangle, but it wasn’t long enough ...”

“... Disko​ bay was dotted with small icebergs as I left the cottage I was renting in a small town in western Greenland one grey Sunday morning in early March. I sank up to my knees, having failed to work out where the safe path up the hill to the road was under the snow. People say the icebergs aren’t as big as they used to be. Somebody showed me a picture of Ilulissat from the 1990s, a 300-feet-tall iceberg Alping it over the town ...”

“... In​ Grimsby, the former fishing capital of England, sandpipers scurry across the tarmac of derelict streets. The sandpiper isn’t a creature of asphalt and paving. It’s a small white-breasted bird usually to be found foraging on British foreshores in groups of twenty or so, scuttling up and down sandy beaches as the foaming forward edge of the sea roars in and hisses back ...”

“... Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain? After all, the lights still shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E ...”

“... A housing shortage that has been building up for the past thirty years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space ...”

“... How to explain​ Poland’s swing against the European Union? How to explain the election of the Catholic fundamentalist, authoritarian, populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party to rule a booming country that has benefited from more than €130 billion in EU investment in its roads, railways and schools, a country where only a few years after EU accession in 2004 hundreds of foreign factories and distribution centres opened, employing hundreds of thousands of people, a country whose citizens have taken advantage of EU freedom of movement to travel, work and study across the continent in their millions? If Britain is straining the EU by leaving, Law and Justice’s Poland is straining it by staying, attacking the EU’s contradictory institutional positions – its promotion of human rights, its secularism and multiculturalism, its belief in state welfare, its embrace of mobile capital – with contradictory positions of its own ...”

“... Early last year,​Jeremy Corbyn and his wife went to Newcastle and took the bus the short distance up the coast to Blyth in Northumberland, to see their old friend, the former Labour MP and miners’ leader Ronnie Campbell, who was gravely ill. It was a private visit by one left-wing insubordinate to another, by a campaigner who tried to re-radicalise Labour to one of his most loyal supporters ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”

“... sustainable. Democracy needs reinvention at a level deeper than the Cleggeron has spoken of. ...”