“... Nikitenko draws a subtle, even discreet, picture of all this. The most shocking murder in his book may be that of a large white cat, whose taste for stolen lard resulted in its being hanged and left to rot in the noose for two weeks. Nikitenko makes light of the brutishness that formed the background to his early life, and he is careful, in this published ...”

“... collection of Chartist works, and the danger is that by taking the Chartists too seriously, we may overlook the fact that Chartism threatened most when it was at its least sombre. When Carlyle saw the men of 1848 in the streets around Trafalgar Square – the ‘discharged playactors, funambulists, false prophets, drunken ballad-singers’ – he ...”

“... live – to seem to forget you – it is to feed my pain – and so that this seeming forgetting may spring forth more painfully in tears, at a given moment, in the midst of this life, when you appear to me in it * time – that body takes to obliterate itself in earth – (to merge little by little with neutral earth on the vast horizons) it is then that ...”

“... in grocery stores. Most cases were dedicated to a specific martyr, containing his belt, bullets he may have fired, or were fired at him, maybe even the shrapnel or bullet that killed him, his government-issue toothbrush, his ID, a school report, a brush and comb. A red and yellow striped shirt, good as new, next to a picture of a young man wearing it; a shot ...”

“... Penrose had brought from Venice. Afterwards he sat in a room alone, weeping. ‘Whatever humour may dominate,’ Penrose writes, ‘there is always instability in P.’s mood. While in the happiest of moods, for some imperceptible reason a shadow falls across his face. It becomes pale, ridden with care and his eyes blacken like two nails driving deep into ...”

“... his own Big Ideas are true. His films come off like Eisenstein with a voiceover, and though Curtis may not share the belief, held by some Soviet directors of the 1920s, that viewers’ reactions can be precisely manipulated by fine-tuning the duration, content and juxtaposition of images, he certainly aims to seduce. I find myself more worried by his ...”

“... on the whole they do well, but have no wider or critical sense of what the government is up to. It may be that the decay of the cabinet under Blair simply continues a long constitutional process: that the problem is wider than just the character of the Labour Party. But the docility of the present cabinet has to do with more than constitutional process: it is ...”

“... does not seem to care much about the happiness of her children when making matches.’ This may be cherished along with some other unflinching obiter dicta: ‘many a widow, thinking that the funeral, if not the reading of the will, would mark the end of all that could be expected from her in the way of public griefs, has found that some problems are ...”

“... in Ireland’. One of the wounded delivery men was Polish. His involvement in the latest violence may be a hint of things to come, as large-scale immigration into Northern Ireland disturbs the integrity of an ancient quarrel – or at least varies the usual pattern of confrontation. The Orange Order has been intimidating Catholics for two hundred years, but ...”

“... me’) and even attempts at self-knowledge, are all – in this mood – plastic bubbles the poet may pop. But she has other goals, and other moods. Though she can still come across (as she did in the 1970s and 1980s) as wonderfully sarcastic, curtly appalled, she’s now often patient, or sadly wry, or resigned: we are all in this vale of deception ...”

“... Tsing believes, that don’t just include people: ‘multi-species storytelling’, she claims, may kickstart the revolution that is needed to make sense of ‘the world that progress has left to us’. Matsutake, with ‘its willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes’, allows us ‘to explore the ruin that has become our collective home’. This is the ...”

“... Some people​ don’t like the idea that they may be living in a metropolitan bubble, but René Unterlinden, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s latest book, has been raised to call the bubble his home. ‘De point is,’ his father – not the only character in the novel with a comic accent – tells him, ‘we like de bubble, and so do you … So dis iss who you are … The boy in the bubble ...”

“... what’s the use,’ in a few weeks writes a novel instead, and never looks back. It may all sound a little apocryphal or parabolic, but the novel was Frost, written in 1963, and in 2006 I translated it for Janeway. She described it (the commission, not the translation) as being from the ‘Achduschreck!’ – which I might translate as the ...”

“... running down Russia while profiting from it. And profit they have. When writing that scene, Gessen may have had in mind the former president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, who was a key Western adviser to the Russian privatisation programme. As a US Treasury official in the early 1990s, he helped design the institutions that would allow a small group of ...”

“... it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows.’ It was May Sinclair who applied the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to fiction (it’s unclear whether or not she had James’s definition in mind), in a review of the first three volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in 1918. Richardson wasn’t ...”