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“... stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who ...”

“... millions of women everywhere – readers of Jane Austen and the Brontës as well as of Hardy and George Eliot, viewers of classic American Westerns along with readers of Little Women. Her own 19th-century sense of things seems to have had no trace of modern cynicism or distancing irony to dull its edge, or any corrupting doubt to cloud her vision. In her ...”

“... was available, courtesy of Moscow, to every nascent terrorist band, nationalist or revolutionary, urban or rural, European or Latin American. They had but to ask. The Russians gave weapons, diplomatic cover, money and know-how to the Palestinians, who in turn passed it on to everyone else. They were helped by Castro, who laid on training camps and instructors ...”

“... The watercress girl documented by Mayhew becomes a dream figure, a figment of the romance of the urban poor. In Past Tenses Steedman reflects ruefully that she seems incapable of saying anything ‘without messing with some other story, some other person’s narrative’. Conventionally one would think of the watercress girl as a starting-point for the ...”

“... New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty quays full of ‘hard nostalgia’. And ...”

“... Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them incorporated key elements of the ...”

“... life took the shape of playwright. ‘I want to be an artist or nothing,’ he wrote in 1914 to George Pierce Baker, applying to Baker’s famous Harvard playwriting course (tuition was paid for by the Bank of Dad). James O’Neill (c. 1880). The grandiosity of O’Neill’s plan nonetheless broadcast his Oedipal rebellion. ‘My soul is a ...”

“... who finds common ground with the pronouncements of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a ...”

“... to cede manhood suffrage. What was proposed was a system of multi-member constituencies for urban areas, which would effectively protect a minority party from swamping. Initially Labour might gain seats in this way: but in the long run a rising Labour Party would be restricted to its proportionate share, and thus the Conservative – or Liberal ...”

“... historical reality in the name of Jacobino-Leninist piety. He struck the pose of liberal St George taking on the dragons of Marxist and Communist ideological conformity and seemed never to let his guard down, even for a moment of celebration. The tone of Revolutionary France is surprisingly serene, in contrast, as if the author knew that the major ...”

“... over the war’s duration and differences across the UK were predominantly a result of rural-urban divides.Townshend refers to the work of Thomas Macknight, a journalist often credited with pioneering the ‘two nations theory’ – in which Ulster Protestants form their own distinct nation on the island of Ireland. He doesn’t mention ...”

“... of the last fifteen years isn’t one of the six who have been prime minister over that time. George Osborne would no doubt have loved to be PM, but he probably knew it wasn’t a job for him. Too smirky, too shifty, too obviously at home in City boardrooms – the British public could tell a mile off that Osborne was a bit of a banker. That made him, in ...”

“... works very well as a collection of essays and impressions, or a kind of encyclopedia of obscure urban knowledge. But, of course, there’s more to it than that. As the end-of-chapter climaxes get more and more overblown, certain mannerisms – like the biographical conceit of the title – come to seem more than just a means of organising the ...”

“... In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail he kept from George Plimpton for years. His third novel, Raditzer (1961), depicts yet another young man of means resisting paternal influence: Charles Stark foregoes joining his father’s law firm to enlist in the navy just as the war is ending. Shipping out to the ...”

“... and political marginalisation weakened traditionalist leaders and the established clergy. Poor, urban young Shia – living in what became known as the ‘belt of misery’ around Beirut – channelled their militancy through leftist activism, rebelling against the oppressive and corrupt Lebanese state. Then a charismatic Iranian cleric of Lebanese ...”