“... cingulum that was every fighting man’s pride, the sign that he was a soldier. No headstone would mark his grave – there was no one for miles to do the carving and, besides, headstones had been falling out of fashion for centuries. Only the memory of the young soldier would remain, fixed in the minds of onlookers by the spectacle, by the precious things ...”

“... continued repression of their role in Vienna. The latest Anglophone chronicler of this group, Mark Francis, has every reason to conclude that his heroes’ ‘reputation is at its greatest outside Vienna’. This is a further incentive for resenting and ignoring them. Let me cite two episodes that illustrate this attitude. The first concerns Arnold ...”

“... does not seem to permit a study of the Florentine palace of the Renaissance along the lines of Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House. However, Goldthwaite has put his finger on an important problem, all the more important because the example of the Florentines was followed all over Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. In Genoa, for ...”

“... This is not, of course, a universally valid dictum. Even the combined and mellifluous resources of Mark Girouard and Yale University Press have yet to unfurl the full panoply of best-selling nostalgia on behalf of such doomed and dodoed delights as education before the comprehensive (Life in the English Secondary Mod?), arithmetic before the pocket calculator ...”

“... 1933 he went as Himmler’s guest of honour to a dinner at the Munich Löwenbräukeller to mark the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s failed Putsch. As he gushed to Ada, writing in the first person plural,the celebration was deeply moving. We saw and heard the Führer for the first time … The Führer is high-minded and noble in his goals, an inspired ...”

“... immigration, the fanaticism and servility of ‘the Arab faith’, the dreariness of modern urban Britain. (Of Cricklewood, Willie says: ‘I wouldn’t want to live here. Imagine coming back here day after day. What would be the point of anything?’) But the last hundred pages are dominated by sex, and Naipaul’s obsession with sex between ...”

“... appeared to have gone out. The fear was delicious and infectious, and where officialdom left off urban myth took over. Everyone claimed to know someone who knew someone who had been blinded or lost fingers. I once picked up a spent yet red-hot sparkler and became a casualty, led away screaming.When we were a little older – the years of feral, bike-riding ...”

“... such well-defended frontier outposts to confront neighbours. It can also be contrasted with nearby urban settlements, apparently of the same era but with very different characteristics, within the known bounds of Philistine territory. They do not share its plan or architecture: it has an oval defensive barrier constructed distinctively as two parallel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wild spending on buildings, books and vestments, and Julius II half a century later, found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified the Borgo, the area around Saint Peter’s Basilica, and rebuilt the Trevi fountain, part of an ancient system that still brought water into the city (one of the tasks, and one of the marks, of authority in ...”

“... but treated consumer goods of which they approved – modern Scandinavian furniture, say – as a mark of classlessness and independence of mind. Lawrence – who opens his book with a moving portrait of his own parents’ experiences with education and military service, manual labour and shopkeeping, home-ownership and mobility – is highly sensitive to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the group precisely: a return to American Pop as native culture – might this ‘nativity’ mark the definitive replacement of folk by Pop? For better or worse, the IG members were near enough to this American culture to know it well, but also far enough away to desire it still, with the result that they didn’t question it much. In some ways Banham ...”

“... in the outtakes. And they get grimmer and grimmer. Perhaps what’s terrifying about these new urban landscapes is that they imply the possibility of a life lived as one long outtake. The world seems to be made more and more of stuff we’re not supposed to look at, a banal infrastructure that supports the illusion of automotive independence, the largely ...”

“... much of the writing, even in City, assured him of marginality, at best. City’s subject-matter is urban, the technique a blend of the surreal, expressionist, realist and cubist, the whole thing almost cinematic in its abrupt transitions and dislocations. In fact, the sort of thing you see every day on TV adverts or in front of your nose on Tottenham Court ...”