“... celebrities; a fat man has ‘Pavarottian girth’; another, a good-looking Muslim, ‘resembled George Clooney with darker skin and a neatly trimmed beard’. Pointing out these lines, I feel like the mayor’s aide, ‘a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it’. The soft brown spots ...”

“... carpet, the scum, and prepare to airlift in a dune or two, with deckchairs and parasols, for an urban beach. A rising hysteria grips the fortunate Olympic boroughs; funny money is available, in serious quantities, for those who can come up with the right kind of fun. If you were going to hunt dogs, Victoria Park wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Those ...”

“... of most Irish poetry are rarely as pronounced in mainland British verse. Edwin Morgan and George Szirtes are both willing to expand their poetics beyond its traditional range. Morgan has always delighted in maverick experiments both with the typewriter and with scissors-and-paste, and his new book, Themes on a Variation, provides the customary amalgam ...”

“... their princes at times of war might pick up weapons when necessary.In a fascinating section on urban minstrelsy, Rastall (who wrote most of the chapters) draws on records from civic authorities and guilds to describe some of the duties assigned to minstrels employed by towns. They were paid for their work through regular taxation and appeared at both ...”

“... of neoliberal economics were imposed across the world, investment poured into once dilapidated urban neighbourhoods and the World Wide Web made its first appearance. The period is encapsulated by the excruciating video of Bill Gates and his colleagues dancing on stage at Microsoft’s Windows 1995 launch, the equally cringeworthy video of the entire ...”

“... into the atmosphere, how about trying harder to suck some of it out? In the budget in March, George Osborne announced that the government intended to take ‘two major carbon capture and storage projects to the next stage of development’. One of them, in the words of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, ‘involves capturing around 90 per cent ...”

“... 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 furnished two-storey terraced house in Bury where he currently lives. The ...”

“... because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t understand.’) H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan subsidised their succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard ...”

“... than accompany his wife on her shopping trips. But while his comments on modern architecture and urban planning may be sincerely meant, it is right royal naiveté to suppose that Britain’s social and environmental problems can best be solved by turning the whole country into a Canaletto-like theme park. And his concern for the disadvantaged has not exactly ...”

“... of the horse as a working animal was coming to an end. The disappearance of the horse from urban –and later rural – life didn’t happen overnight. Horses and donkeys were still found in great numbers in British towns and cities until just after the Second World War, when the shift to motorised transportation of goods caused the collapse of the ...”

“... the here and now, and of women’s space within it. She does not do landscape or nature – the urban park and the boating lake are as far as that goes; nor does she give us action, history, myth, still life, houses, horses, sunsets or those forbidden parts of the Opéra. She does not do men much, though her double portrait of her brother Alexander with his ...”

“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... 1387). Two maps, Georg Braun’s of 1572 and Wenceslaus Hollar’s of 1660, help illustrate the urban transformation of the Strand in the 16th and 17th centuries. It went from a picturesque road bordered by fields to the north to the largest in a hubbub of streets leading to squares, including Covent Garden (marked on Hollar’s map as a ‘piazza’). The ...”

“... whose ideas shaped the politics of Asian exclusion was the American political economist Henry George, a firm critic of monopoly capital. (Ironically, his work later inspired Sun Yat-sen, the first leader of the Kuomintang.) In 1869 he published an essay on ‘The Chinese in California’. The split between labour and capital, ...”

“... First, sort out your Scotts. George Gilbert Scott (1811-78), hereafter Sir Gilbert, designed the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office and the tumultuous cliff of a hotel that shields St Pancras Station. A spiteful ditty, summing up the Victorian business of church restoration, also accounted him first among ‘the earnest band that spoiled half the churches in the land ...”