“... history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: ‘There are new voices speaking from the depths and fullness of the Negro’s life, and they are harbingers of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key ...”

“... knife, the seven sheriffs discharged a volley of 29 rounds at her, 18 of which found their mark. Davis ends with a long chapter on Fontana, his birthplace, a town just off Interstate 10 and rarely visited by the genteel classes who whizz by on the way to Palm Springs with their windows rolled up. Fontana embodies a trio, a triage too, of dreams which ...”

“... of trade and finance in their polity. Becher offered them recipes: direct state control of the urban workshops, the establishment of lucrative slave colonies in the New World, systems of credit to guarantee mercantile enterprise. And he also had a language in which to speak of these newfangled projects: the vocabulary and techniques of alchemy, which ...”

“... and more new houses, perhaps, and more electrified railway lines, but also more pollution and more urban decay. The desire for change has sprung from the consciousness that the old regime offered nothing to look forward to, nothing to aim for in life. Everything necessary for daily existence was secure: free schooling, medical care, crèches and ...”

“... or a connectionist, you probably favour webs, networks, switchboards, or the sort of urban grid where the streets are equidistant and meet at right angles: New York’s Midtown, rather than its Greenwich Village. Such images suggest a kind of mind every part of which is a lot like every other. Take a sample here and you find the concept dog ...”

“... he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben ...”

“... out to an evening party, their children, the babysitter, Jack (her boyfriend) and Jack’s buddy Mark. There is no single authoritative story-line, though some readers might claim that it is possible to deduce one. In a series of discontinuous paragraphs Coover cross-cuts between the fantasy-stories which the various characters might have told themselves as ...”

“... problem was the famine in Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan: to avoid the collapse of the urban rationing system, starving peasants had to be prevented from fleeing to the cities. ‘Passportisation’ was the clumsy term for the process of issuing internal passports to citizens judged worthy, starting in the biggest cities at the beginning of ...”

“... success. The ‘barbarous and wicked’ trade persisted – and loomed large in the fears of urban parents.Like many key developments in the history of early modern England, emigration had its origins in the dramatic population growth that began in the mid-16th century. Poverty, inflation and civil disorder prompted legislation like the Statute of ...”

“... from Irish people; by 1990, the figure had jumped to 45 million and this year’s census may well mark another leap. Irish pride and nationalism have always been magnified in the United States. In her autobiography, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the leader of the American Communist Party, described the attitudes of her Irish-born mother and American-born ...”

“... in ‘myths and memory’, in a shared sense of what to do and how to do it, something akin to ‘urban legend’. Torture happened before the memos, and happened in lots of places. So where did these urban legends come from? Phillips finds two principal sources. The first is evidence of a fearful symmetry: the training ...”

“... state to honour a conservative president, a cultural centre pitched as ‘a catalyst for urban regeneration’ that assisted in the further erasure of Les Halles and the gradual gentrification of the Marais. Such tensions have run through the subsequent careers of both Rogers and Piano, who have long identified with the left even as they have ...”

“... Clem Glass, flying home to London after witnessing a massacre in Africa. He returns to urban disarray, the tawdry backdrop to life in London. It was May, and already more summer than spring. The leaves on the roadside trees were dustless, vivid, part luminous. Until late into the evening cars crawled in the traffic, windows down, music ...”

“... song. Other sources offer snatches of early modern voices: town criers’ records tell us how the urban authorities spoke to the people; accounts of interrogations reproduce not just the words of the accused but their stammers or cries of pain; and travellers’ diaries bring to life the shouts of hawkers in the streets of European cities. Histories of oral ...”

“... for the metropolis’ where wave after wave of immigrants struggled to gain a foothold on the urban economy: Huguenot silk weavers, the Irish who were set to work undercutting them, Jewish refugees from late 19th-century pogroms in East Europe, and the Bengalis who have settled in the area since the 1950s. Since 1975, Spitalfields has achieved a national ...”