“... 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 ...”

“... only with lousy weather. At first I was surprised at how little had changed. The Ben Tre school of urban planning (‘It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’) has of course left its mark here as elsewhere, notably in the form of one-way systems of the kind Birmingham recently took to their logical ...”

“... conscious of, when we see the black streams that welter out of factories, the dreary lengths of urban and suburban dustiness,                 The squares and streets,                 And the faces that one meets, irradiated with a gleam of divine purity. The cityscape has its Dickensian gleams, too. When Ralph and Jack ...”

“... to themselves and to society at large. One way out of this conceptual impasse was to blame modern urban civilisation for the apparent failings of the female body, and to locate a simpler way of life, in which women’s ‘natural’ functions had been performed without difficulty, in the relatively recent small-town and rural past: a claim which would surely ...”

“... by an understandable pleasure in the Gehry building. It romps and gleams along the scarred urban riverside, with a ruggedness that can even seem quite Basque, while its turrets curve upwards and outwards in a way that has readily been interpreted as denoting rebirth. Nevertheless, globalist cheer-leading cannot quite explain the funny nationalism that ...”

“... tucked into each of them, is a little label with your name and seat number, the book title, press mark and so on, all printed out. So much for slip nostalgia. This is just one of the ways in which the habits of one of the old libraries have been incorporated into the culture of the new building. Now that reading rooms once scattered all over London ...”

“... and almost all of them come from northern or north-eastern China. Then a Western face showed up. Mark Rowswell is Canadian. He made his name performing xiangsheng at the gala several years in a row, becoming the best-known and most loved foreigner in China. In a recent interview, Rowswell talked about how bored he was of always playing the role of a Western ...”

“... and more open acceptance of their place in the city. Soho’s self-branding in the 1990s as an urban ‘gay village’ has become one of the capital’s major selling points. On www.visitBritain.co.uk, ‘Gay London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian McKellen’. Houlbrook expresses ...”

“... eye for female fashion, he had no particular grip on the times he was living in. He avoided the urban scene and his few dips into social commentary were soft-hearted and timid. That might be one way to lend his elusive temperament at least a negative definition. For Victorian commentators, it was just as relevant that this non-Modernist was not Lord ...”

“... This depiction was in line with the way the rebels had been remembered in Ireland. In 1966, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the rising, train stations across the republic were named after the fifteen men. Amiens Street station became Dublin Connolly. The state’s appropriation of Connolly’s memory was paradoxical, given the highly conservative ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead. He had the serenity of a man at the end of his life. And, given the circumstances, he had not done too badly. I had spent much of that day on the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling past long queues of Tata trucks from India, through ...”

“... we now take for granted in style culture, the ‘DNA of British youth culture, leaving its mark on glam and Northern Soul, punk and Two Tone, Britpop and rave’. But DNA is one thing, ‘leaving a mark’ quite another. Was Mod central and catalytic, or peripheral and intermittent? Because Mod itself came to signify ...”

“... you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn ...”

“... Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy does for the market what the London Dungeon does for urban history. It’s a compendium of horror stories arising from what one might call the ryanairation of social life, the breakdown of once cash-free practices into severally billable units of account. Capitol Hill lobbying outfits now pay queuing firms to stand in line, sometimes overnight, so that the lobbyists can step in just before a committee session starts; ‘concierge’ medical companies offer queue-jumping treatment to those willing to stump up the fees ...”