“... the troubles of Chechnya’s first spell of independence between 1991 and 1994. Those early post-Soviet years had seen a rise in criminality and mafia activity in every part of Russia and the former Soviet republics, as people grabbed what had previously been state property, sought to get their hands on the sources of wealth in a new free-for-all ...”

“... Jonathan Raban is afraid of the sea, saying it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate ...”

“... Jonathan Lethem’s novels tend to be fusions of genres. As She Climbed across the Table (1997) is a science-fiction campus novel; Girl in Landscape (1998) an SF western. Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), his first novel, is a detective story set in a dystopian future. Narcotics are doled out by the state, and knowledge of the past has been eradicated ...”

“... Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were ...”

“... Tucson are swell, Mackie has an awfully nice Red Cross job (so we’ve enough money), I live off post and get to play tennis, I like the people in my department, I’m even writing poems. My two subjects are: bombing Hamburg and bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our ...”

“... Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), the first book by Jonathan Crary, now Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia. The recent move to digital modes of image production and distribution had prompted Crary to reflect on revolutions in visuality in the past.Techniques of the Observer begins by ...”

“... than Andrew’s fling,’ Tyrrel says, and ‘he would have been looking pretty sweaty and macho post-chukka.’ Camilla soon started seeing Charles whenever he wasn’t off with the Navy, and Andrew whenever he wasn’t off with the Army. Charles had been encouraged, by Mountbatten and others, to have relationships with what Tyrrel calls ...”

“... harbours in their modern forms, in 1866-70 and 1946-49. In 1838, the seigneur’s suggestion of a post office was rejected; letters from Guernsey were left on the beach in baskets until the tenants relented in 1857. In the 1960s, the eminent landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe was invited to produce an island development plan; Chief Pleas rejected it. Fear ...”

“... particular attachment to an eschatology. After death nothing much was threatened or promised, and post-mortem hopes and fears played little part in normal Greek religion. (I say ‘normal Greek religion’: many Greeks feared death and ‘the things in Hades’; several off-beat sects – Orphics or Pythagoreans or Platonists – described an after-life of ...”

“... all, ‘uncompromised’ (the description is his own), and he came to play a major role in the post-war reorganisation of the university. But Leipzig was in the Eastern zone, and in the autumn of the year the Russians took over from the Americans. Plus ça change. Gadamer soon discovered that he ‘belonged to the political “élite” of the Soviet ...”

“... in July 1834, only seven years after seriously turning his energies to politics, and he held the post very nearly throughout the next seven. But Mitchell’s Melbourne was a lazy and fatalistic dilettante; his rise, consequently, was not his own doing. Melbourne ‘sought nothing from politics but to be diverted and amused’; he ‘lacked a confidence in ...”

“... now. This can be attributed to a range of pressures: the unattractive economic choices imposed by post-2008 austerity politics; the dependence on a particular unproductive vested interest, old age pensioners; and, above all, the allure of Brexit. The triumph of Brexit is the clearest example of the conquest of Conservatism by an idea which, whatever one ...”

“... from Canada, and France had assisted with Britain’s ousting from what was now the United States. Post-Napoleon, France tried briefly to use its power in Spain to maintain some influence in Spanish South America, now the site of multiple rebellions against European rule. By the 1820s, it accepted that the rebels, helped by British naval and commercial ...”

“... department of the Central Committee, which he did, though giving him an equally responsible role. Jonathan Steele and Eric Abraham characterised Chernenko as a ‘classic apparatchik’ who was ‘nothing but a Brezhnev associate’. But they also noted signs of his ‘continuing power’, and in particular the possibility that his being given the important ...”

“... In January 2010, Jonathan Katz was working in Haiti for the Associated Press, the only American news organisation with a permanent bureau there. Other foreign journalists lived there, and a few more flew in for elections and catastrophes, but for the most part Haiti coverage had become a casualty of slashed budgets at dying newspapers and magazines ...”