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“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”

“... to have the cool exactitude of his father’s studies of the private lives of sea anemones. Peter Abbs’s introduction to the current Penguin edition, first published in 1983, accepts the memoir as a faithful record of what happened: ‘As a documentary record we know, from other sources, that most of the facts are accurate.’ This is very much the ...”

“... African colonies; in one episode, droves of porters drag boats through the jungle to the shores of Lake Tanganyika for a naval confrontation between the Germans and the British. (Germany’s African colonies were seized at the Treaty of Versailles, and became League of Nations mandates in 1920.) Africans fighting and labouring in Europe were not Kentridge’s ...”

“... she is giving him a blowjob in the back of his patrol car, and then dumps her body in the local lake. The considerable imaginative achievement of Gier lies in capturing and holding for a moment the darkness at the core of Janisch’s psyche, the same darkness that billows up from the cellar in Amstetten. The style of Jelinek’s essay ‘Im ...”

“... annexed Yeats but overlaid the southern edge of Ireland with a blown-up inset of the Lake District. The Longman’s decision to mark Gaelic-speaking areas on a map of the British Isles announces its devolutionary agenda as clearly as the new Norton’s move to balance its traditional map of London by another of the Empire honours its growing ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”

“... of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would continue on my way to ...”

“... beauty of the imperial palace in the autumn ‘defies description’, and the foliage beside the lake becomes ‘a blaze of color’. As night descends, chanting begins; then gongs sound; just before dawn, a procession of 20 finely-robed priests carries ‘the consecrated objects’ across ‘the magnificent Chinese bridges in the garden’. The Emperor’s ...”

“... what is today Belarus). When he was ten, the family moved to Racine in Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan. They weren’t very devout and he had no particular sense of Jewish identity. Dropping out of the University of Wisconsin after three days, he walked straight into a newspaper job in Chicago. He learned there that ‘the leaders of causes were ...”

“... from which he might plausibly challenge Rome, not least by turning the Black Sea into a Pontic lake. Famously admonished by the Roman Gaius Marius either to be greater than Rome or to obey her, Mithridates alone of his contemporaries attempted the former path. Secret treaties, open annexations, clandestine poisonings and one very public murder (a ...”

“... more disturbing than they had anticipated: Mats Olsson, observing the rape-like mating of the Lake Eyre dragon in Australia, saw a male lizard bite his female victim so hard while impregnating her that she died. Often it is not enough to be a mere voyeur with a long lens. Like a manipulative aristocrat in a Jacobean drama, the intrepid investigator ...”

“... edition, with its alternately haunting and embarrassing photomontages and a fine introduction by Peter Porter, is a perfect invitation to rereading. There are many people who are sure the Quartet is a masterpiece of some sort, however patchy; and there are people who are sure it’s not a masterpiece because they find it unreadable. I have, at different ...”

“... provided for her by the Litfond. The sandy track where it was located went by the grand name of Lake Street. Three pedestrians, not all of whom could have been KGB, exhausted the three possible accentuations of the adjective ozernaya (‘lake’) before I located it. She came out onto the porch, lured into sight by ...”

“... raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is tumultuous, though the torrent has never been as powerful as it was in 1967 when (perhaps melodramatically) I envisaged the lake dam breaking and engulfing the whole village. The ...”

“... Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. The Swimming-Pool Library is a rich and clever and funny novel. The richness is in large part a matter of the density of detail the book manages to accumulate, detail ...”