“... who was relieved to be told that she could define herself, when she filled in forms, as ‘urban poor’. No one got a fresh start through the Revolution. ‘If you had a bad class origin you always felt that you’d done something terrible. I used to hate filling in official forms because I had to put down “reactionary army officer” in the section ...”

“... so, but with the fracturing of the institutions of family and neighbourhood, and the growth of urban sprawl, the restaurant is now one of the few spaces left that can provide a ‘sense of place’: As social beings we are a function of the things that we consume which, in turn, depend substantially on the ‘whereness’ of that consumption. Thus, sense ...”

“... Muir scoring on the quality and imagination of his photographs and the Beckinsales making their mark with the originality of their maps and diagrams. The English heartland is defined as a quadrant of land stretching from the Marlborough Downs and the Chiltern Hills in the south to the Arden Plateau and Northamptonshire Heights in the north. The heartland ...”

“... Morris dancing has become part of postcard England, a quintessential antidote to all that urban multi-culturalism. Central to the sustained scholarly argument of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, and to the shorter pieces that make up his Small Acts, is an attack on ethnic absolutism, on the conflation of race and culture and the identification of ...”

“... the worn-out genius: the Eng. Lit. patient, palely loitering. It’s a conservative premise. The mark of ‘genius’ is surely dissatisfaction, the ability to imagine beyond what has already been done. Motion imagines the least imaginative route Keats, had he lived, could have taken: usefulness. Anthony Burgess suggested a wittier alternative in his ...”

“... the modern world. The refugees, the emigrants and their disturbed children who people her elegiac urban landscapes are perpetually bound to remember what cannot be restored. Their nervous reluctance to draw attention to themselves, or to ask too much, their uneasy clinging to old habits, all mark the exile’s ...”

“... space for self-reflection. The old order had been disarrayed; a new mould, the conformism of mass urban culture, had not yet set. The demographic explosion gave Britain a surplus of young workers, and the long mid-Victorian economic surge seemed to have put an end to the boom-and-bust cycles of the earlier 19th century, which had crushed so many careers and ...”

“... with the rake reappears whether Marshall is picturing individuals from history or contemporary urban ambiences. It catalyses De Style (1993), the archly titled barbershop scene that became his calling-card image. Barber, customer and two über-stylists with wild hairdos stare out from a salon interior presented with a sharp, Mondrian-like ...”

“... musical entertainment. Its greatest figure, who has been properly honoured in the 536 pages of Mark Tucker’s Duke Ellington Reader, a ‘source-book of writings on Ellington’, lived and died as a travelling band-leader. It was not that he had to – in his later years he subsidised his band out of his royalties – but that he could not conceive of ...”

“... as he escapes to Claridge’s in his private jet. All too single, the dramatic images miss their mark. ‘What, into this?’ The words are those of the king of infinite space up against his nutshell, the ‘etherial spirit of man’ as Carlyle put it, up against ‘two or three feet of sorry tripe full of–’, the voice of whatever it is in us which in ...”

“... be hard to argue that Tibet was a special case in the wider Chinese drive to achieve the ugliest urban environment imaginable. Is the destruction of Lhasa a greater tragedy than the devastation of Beijing? Both have suffered the despoliation of historic and religious buildings; the inhabitants of both have been traumatised by successive political ...”

“... aqueducts and drains – and getting the barbarians to take a bath and appreciate a little solid urban architecture. For all the snobbery of Cicero, with his habit of dropping the Greek equivalent of le mot juste into his correspondence or of writing conceitedly about his art collection, to attribute creativity, originality or sophisticated ideas to the ...”

“... Turkifying, state-centric ideology of the founding vanguard came to be known, was supported by the urban elites of the country’s western cities, but elsewhere – in the Anatolian provinces and the south-east, the area closest to the Middle East – the reforms achieved at best a superficial penetration. Nearly a century later, a new cultural revolution is ...”

“... relegated to the background by the revolution against Spain, power lay in the hands of an urban oligarchy: this was diverging into two wings, the ‘Regent’ or administrative and the commercial, but the two still formed a close harmonious élite. Trading companies were often launched by the state. So they sometimes were by royal officials – in ...”

“... contrasting environments were to condition Blok’s life and his verse. On the one hand, the urban scenery of St Petersburg, ‘the most fantastic and intentional city in the world’, as Dostoevsky called it; on the other, the Russian countryside around the Beketov estate at Shakhmatovo, where the poet’s summers were spent. On the one ...”