Last Friday, Jonathan Rutherford recommended the Russians Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam. The former reassured us from Soviet exile that, ‘In Petersburg we’ll meet again / As though it was where we’d laid the sun to rest.’ From our more mundane exile we can look ahead to reunions in our own Petersburgs. In the meantime I’ve been led to books whose vividness contrasts with this strange, sterile passage of time.