“... 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 ...”

“... West Germans or just assorted Westerners, they return chatting about industrial pollution and urban decay, about symptoms of economic fear and political change: but they dwell on an overpowering sense of recognition. As the empire falls, liberty advances, and a knowledge of former secrets swirls around us, it isn’t the changes but the continuities that ...”

“... encyclopedic form it claimed some casualties: not only George Eliot’s Casaubon and the Mark Pattison upon whom the character is often said to be based, but H.H. Vaughan, Regius Professor of History. Gradually an accommodation between the two groups was worked out. Engel closes with a fine analysis of the effects of the agricultural depression on ...”

“... with a cross through it. Paduans buying their bread could verify its size by holding it up to this mark – a demonstration of the way daily provisions were regulated by the city.Market inspectors like the sensales of Pisa might have checked their rods against the pietra, but their instruments would often have been bent, warped and chipped. This meant that ...”

“... to her was her parents’ refusing to show up at her civil wedding to a Jew’). They have a son, Mark, who lives with his wife and three children in Albuquerque. Waking before dawn, Jack lies in bed beside his overweight, snoring wife, his mind steeped in despair: ‘Fear and loathing squirm inside him like the components of a bad restaurant meal – twice ...”

“... flower, and became a Zionist, setting up a Jewish spy network in Palestine to help the Allies; and Mark Sykes, co-author of the notorious Sykes-Picot agreement, secretly parcelling out Syria, Palestine and Iraq behind Lawrence’s back in 1916. For Sykes Anderson has nothing but contempt: ‘Few people in history have so heedlessly caused so much ...”

“... in The North Ship.’ Just as ‘Larkin, the mature poet, was later to transfigure the clichés of urban folklore and advertising in poems such as “Essential Beauty” or “Sunny Prestatyn”’ so he turns ‘well-worn schoolgirl clichés into moving elegies (“Now the ponies all are dead”)’ and ‘the intimate domestic triviality of the schoolgirl ...”

“... everyday things. As the curator Walter Hopps commented, they also underscore ‘the fact of a new urban surface’. Nevertheless, the two series do share an essential operation in negation. After two White Paintings were exhibited in September 1953, Cage offered this litany: ‘No subject/No image/No taste/No object/No beauty/No message/No talent/No technique ...”

“... were divided vertically between a ‘modernist’ (Geertz would later call it ‘scripturalist’) urban, and a traditionalist rural segment, so the abangan were split horizontally between a rapidly growing Communist Party based on the rural and urban poor, and a heavily Javanese upper and middle-class-led Nationalist ...”

“... vernacular art, popular art – would likewise seem to have some relevance. And judging by its urban San Francisco incarnation, the one I know best, outsider art has recently developed some fascinating semantic and subcultural connections with what is known locally as ‘alternative’, ‘urban primitive’ or ...”

“... thought of no longer knowing who he is. So he puts a straw cross on his shoulder, as it were to mark his identity. Unfortunately a neighbour grabs it and says, ‘Now I am you; begone, you are dead!’ at which the furrier goes mad. The joke may be on status-conscious furriers, or it may be an early reaction to ...”

“... giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.’ The mark of a sophisticated realist is that he denies his sophistication at the same point where his work most elaborately displays it. What I tell you is real, he insists, artfully: what all those other fellows do is write books. Raban makes a great show of ...”

“... Penman’s eclectic retrievals from time lost, that he had become a ‘signature’. A logo. A mark. A neon sign that culture buffs will chase without worrying too much what he is writing about. One of those elephantine Hunter S. Thompson, self-cannibalising careers that define the point where it all went wrong, where the floating signifier began to get ...”

“... which the BBC secured the licence fee – frozen at the current level – for the next six years. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, told me in June that the Foreign Office’s continuing control is ‘a fine constitutional point’ which can be addressed in the next charter renewal – no more threatening, he believes, than the potential the ...”