“... 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 ...”

“... through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied ...”

“... the Crimean War. ‘He works like a dog all day and sits up nearly all night,’ wrote the diarist George Templeton Strong, a fellow member of the commission. He ‘sleeps on a sofa in his clothes, and breakfasts on strong coffee and pickles!!!’ Olmsted reported on the ‘avalanche of suffering’ he witnessed on the hospital ships he commanded along the ...”

“... in the work which, more than any other book, provided the title-deeds of the cultural revival: George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect, published by Edinburgh University Press in 1961, was fallible as a history of Victorian Scottish universities, but an eloquent restatement of the deductive basis of the Scottish intellectual tradition assaulted by Buckle ...”

“... tout court. When millions enjoy something, the interest it arouses need not be aesthetic. George Orwell saw propaganda in boys’ weeklies and ‘the worm’s-eye view of life’ in seaside postcards. He was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill. A better reason for paying ...”

“... that at least 64 metropolitan venues were in business between 1661 and 1871. Outside London, urban pleasure gardens such as Spring Gardens in Leeds (in existence from 1715), Spring Gardens in Bath (from 1742), Moore’s Spring Gardens in Norwich (1750s), Vauxhall Gardens in Bristol (1750s and 1770s) and the New Ranelagh Gardens in Newcastle (1760) were ...”

“... solidity of St Martin-in-the-Fields, how both structures dwarf Sir Francis Chantrey’s statue of George IV, and how the unfinished column, in extending out of frame, becomes the sign of a future to which, at least in this picture, neither crown nor church measures up. And then there’s the wooden hoarding that cuts diagonally along the lower edge. The ...”

“... in the 1840s) was almost entirely determined by the idea of re-creating Edinburgh. It sports a George Street, a Hanover Street and an Albany Street, as well as a Castle Street (without the castle) and a Princes Street (with no prince); even in the 1960s, the statue of Robert Burns in the middle of the main street was surrounded by Highland dancers every ...”

“... his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to stand for election to the French National Assembly on the grounds that as long as women remained ‘under the tutelage and the dependency of a man’ they could not be free political agents, to the Roman popular tribune Angelo ...”

“... and therefore more alive than ever. Mother London pivoted on the Blitz, on psychic damage, small urban miracles worked by human affection, a woman walking out of the fire with a newborn baby in her arms. The novel’s trajectory of hurt runs from Thatcher’s denial of the concept of society, the unappeased demons of the free market, to the communality of ...”

“... activities of the poet and natural theologian, was slowly made to seem quaint and unmethodical as urban bodies of collaborative researchers gave their disciplined professional lives to the extension of detailed systems of knowledge. Even Darwin, who drew from the traditions of both the amateur and the specialist, wrote for circles of experts. The decline in ...”

“... living in a city with an atmosphere of perpetual carnival. Caracole has epigraphs from George Eliot and Stendhal, and its tone is set by White’s ability to recreate the burnished prose of a more elegant age; at times it has the air of a classic novel translated from the French. L’amour, in White’s hands, is the subject both of fervid ...”

“... clothing and Warren’s boot blacking, and their equally shabby colleagues who ground out urban ballads, sensational broadsides and last dying speeches of executed criminals for the street trade described in the pages of Henry Mayhew. Between these occupants of the darkest literary limbo and the comparatively prosperous and established writers of ...”

“... that £30,000 would be ‘sufficient to set down with myself and also to serve my friends’, but George Vansittart advised his nephew to get £60,000. The impeachment in 1787 of the former governor-general, Warren Hastings, was intended to expose government malpractice in India, but it lasted eight years and ended in his acquittal.Knights’s achievement is ...”

“... a threat as a specialised form of surveillance: protection against base jumpers, eco abseilers and urban exploration collectives. They cruise like outriders at a royal funeral. When you are swimming at the same altitude as a helicopter, the sight offers reassurance that overrides the recollection of those rare collisions with construction cranes hidden in ...”