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“... of the Soviet period, an ideological simulation of reality. Post-Soviet as well as postmodern, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is about both simulation and reality. There are many ways to characterise Red Plenty and the book’s first sentence provides one: ‘This is not a novel.’ Most simply described, it is a cycle of linked short stories ...”

“... a roughly ten-year cycle, another assessment came due in 1996 and the old material was viewed by Francis Spufford in his eloquent I May Be Some Time with less animus and a more historically minded cultural analysis, mellowing the harshness of the previous ruling. Scott was perhaps a child of the Romantics, a son of the Sublime, a victim of the need for ...”

“... traditionally offered a way for both children and adults to imagine their fundamental aloneness. Francis Spufford writes that, among the Hopi people of the American South-West, it is impossible to be an orphan. No child could slip through the net of family bond: if parents die, a grandparent, aunt, third cousin, someone will step in to fulfil that ...”

“... I am on my cosy sofa, about to have my snooze. ‘One is there in imagination as one reads,’ as Francis Spufford puts it in I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996). ‘But with the possibility of instant withdrawal; one feels for the human figures at the centre of the scene, but one is not exactly in sympathy with them, though it is ...”