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“... The force and originality of Leonid Tsypkin’s writing can be conveyed only by way of sustained quotation. Thus: I was on a train, travelling by day, but it was winter-time – late December, the very depths – and to add to it the train was heading north – to Leningrad – so it was quickly darkening on the other side of the windows – bright lights of Moscow stations flashing into view and vanishing again behind me like the scattering of some invisible hand – each snow-veiled suburban platform with its fleeting row of lamps melting into one fiery ribbon – the dull drone of a station rushing past, as if the train were roaring over a bridge – the sound muffled by the double-glazed windows with frames not quite hermetically sealed into fogged-up, half-frozen panes of glass – pierced even so by the station-lights forcefully etching their line of fire – and beyond, the sense of boundless snowy wastes – and the violent sway of the carriage from side to side – pitching and rolling – especially in the end corridor – and outside, once complete darkness had fallen and only the hazy whiteness of snow was visible and the suburban dachas had come to an end and in the window along with me was the reflection of the carriage with its ceiling-lights and seated passengers, I took from the suitcase in the rack above me a book I had already started to read in Moscow and which I had brought especially for the journey ...”

“... so terrifying to begin with? If a musician listening to a tape can tell whether the fingers on the keys are black or white, should one tremble to acknowledge that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must ...”

“... he behaves with exactly the vulgarian bluster that one would expect of his ex-wife’s ex-husband. Angela Merkel is really a man. And so on. Not all new tokens of information count as news. Some of the disclosures, however, certainly do, such as the uprating by 15,000 of Iraq Body Count’s estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003 in the light of ...”

“... reputations grow more impossible, and fragile, and large.’ Enright was once taught writing by Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, and there’s something of Carter’s sensual, self-fashioning adventuresses in Eliza. The novel keeps edging towards the magical realism which Carter enjoyed. But, in fact, there are no ghosts or visions or talking ...”

“... to have found a sort of forecourt of paradise by cutting off and throwing away what they call the keys of hell. The Czech legion, at the start of the war sent to fight for the Austrians against the Russians, are now nominally fighting for the Social Revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks, but mainly are longing to go home. In the novel and in history a ...”

“... the piano made her migraines worse, could take comfort from knowing that the fingers thumping the keys were Chopin’s. But Jack’s Sand is thankfully not writ so large as that: in this new Life her love affairs and her mannish habits are made to fit smoothly enough with the contradictory rest of her. It can’t, however, be said that the account of the ...”

“... life is a story in Evening in Paradise called ‘Andado: A Gothic Romance’. It is set up like an Angela Carter tale. A new bride is shown to her bedroom, and the bridegroom lays a hairy paw on her breast before disappearing to dress for dinner. ‘This would never happen to her again. When she grew older she would always be in control, even when being ...”

“... his complaint to the world. The irony of the story, as we now know, having seen what happened to Angela Merkel’s phone, is that the NSA would have got hold of the messages between the presidents even before they hit the newspapers. Why did Snowden matter so much? Mostly because the Americans didn’t know what he still had, and how damaging it could ...”

“... key to Leonora was that she was a rebel, and a rebel to the very core of her being.’ With keys like that, who needs locks? This attitude is calamitous for her treatment of Down Below, Carrington’s memoir of mental illness and recovery, about which she cautions: ‘how much … is true, and how much is a result of being unbalanced, is ...”

“... as exhaustive of their condition as social or legal subjects.’ Either women are handed the keys to mental freedom, only to find themselves stranded with no moral or legal recourse to justice; or they are turned into subjects with no control over their own lives. Women are always guilty, of having too much agency or not enough. Most of the cases I have ...”

“... is interesting that these arguments about Kafka’s German are recirculating now, just as Angela Merkel has announced the failure of multiculturalism in Germany and marshalled as evidence the further claim that new immigrants, and indeed their ‘children and grandchildren’, fail to speak German correctly. She has publicly admonished such ...”

“... aspire to, the highest form of social belonging they could expect. Today we are witnessing what Angela McRobbie has described as a ‘neoliberal intensification of mothering’: perfectly turned out middle-class, mainly white mothers, with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended to make all ...”

“... camp-for-kids teatime show, Marc. This was what made them who they were: they could play in both keys, MOR versions of avant-garde modernity. People still get into knots about the ‘mystery’ of Bowie’s serial life-swapping in the 1970s, but he’d been pulling the same trick for years on the perimeter of Tin Pan Alley before he applied it to rock. A bit ...”

“... for Greater Manchester’s two dozen-plus parliamentary seats are, from Lisa Nandy in Wigan to Angela Rayner in Ashton-under-Lyne, from Rebecca Long-Bailey in Salford to George Galloway in Rochdale, the politics of place are as central here as party politics.I met Gavin Grimshaw, six foot four, lean and sunburned in a Lonsdale boxing vest, in the simply ...”