“... 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 ...”

“... Friday, 31 January 1919, when troops and tanks stood by to quell a mass rally, in Glasgow’s George Square, of West of Scotland workers campaigning for a forty-hour week, the event was remembered in the People’s Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as ...”

“... introduced the basic tenets of Marxist thought into a vernacular that would be acceptable to the urban poor.’ This is about as accurate as referring to George Orwell as a Marxist. It is true, however, that Shariati sought out the common ground between Marxist activism and Islamic radicalism, and this certainly helped ...”

“... pardons or commutations had not applied to the Department of Justice for clemency. On 2 July 2007, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence on Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. Libby had been convicted the previous March of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the CIA agent Valerie ...”

“... only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious campaign as an independent, which broke new ground by rallying the white working class against intellectuals and anti-war hippies. Though always less popular than Johnson, Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic ...”

“... or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished Boston’s book culture ...”

“... in film during the Great Depression. More than any other single man, John Wayne would reconnect urban and suburban, blue and white collar, Cold War America to its mythic national past. From 1948 to 1968, the years of John Wayne’s pre-eminence, war films and Westerns were America’s most popular entertainment. Every year from 1949 to the eve of US defeat ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sometimes under pressure – as in parts of France – sometimes ‘naturally’, particularly in urban areas, as ‘hygienic standards were internalised’ and ‘a new body code of behaviour and new sets of attitudes emerged.’ Families, particularly mothers, were more influential than schools or hospitals in changing attitudes, and in the process ‘both ...”

“... Can you feel it? My heart-beat. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Boy George. All the smiley tee-shirts are smiling at me. Smiling faces flash on and off out of the darkness because they are happy. Happiness is in fashion. I am embraced by several people I do not know. Smoke drifts from the little nozzles of electric ...”

“... vaporous – oddly because that might seem to be a way of not coming across (though one remembers George Eliot’s pungent vapour Stephen Guest). Perhaps Highsmith can’t quite bear to think that the matter to be contemplated is less that of a liveliness, a life, annulled than of a collusion between something of a personal nullity and modelling’s nubile ...”

“... a day or two the steps had been transformed into a slope of glinting paper, the flowers strangely urban behind the police cordon. It was also a slope of words: handwritten messages, emails, shop-bought cards and pavement script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on ...”

“... of Jewishness and Arabness – made up the polyglot mix of the eastern Mediterranean and urban Egypt. Henein had been educated in Paris and spent part of his childhood in Rome, and the cry against fascism he raised in 1938 must be put in the context of conditions in Italy and the ambitions of Mussolini in Africa – his new Roman empire. Many of the ...”