“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with contempt and unacknowledged love.’ Maxley’s trauma serves as a licence for reveries on urban loneliness and his feeling that modern life is inauthentic and ‘filthy’. Though he’s presented as a victim of arrested development, a lack of ironic distance means he often comes across as a spokesman for male self-pity who hasn’t finished digesting ...”

“... of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to Wakefield, where George Gissing is not commemorated as fully as he might be – too ‘grim’, perhaps, and too heavily challenged, like many formerly industrial towns and all socialist novelists, for a happy ending. McKie’s purpose is not so much to deny that present-day ...”

“... armies. Vigilantes roamed the South terrorising and lynching uppity African Americans. Massive urban fortresses, public armouries that were often financed by robber barons and equipped with Gatling guns and modern munitions, were designed to deal ruthlessly with incipient insurrections. Responding in kind, armed worker militias paraded in the streets of ...”

“... very public, very secretive man? Slater has read it all, from pathos-ridden tales of an abandoned urban waif, to psychoanalytic accounts of a long-dead man, to attacks on a high-handed writer’s ways of dealing with other people – especially members of his family. His own 1983 study, Dickens and Women, offers a sympathetic and judicious treatment of the ...”

“... ways by later theorists when the public dimension of civic humanism seemed to be privatised by an urban commercial culture. In Barrell’s account the discourse of civic humanism suppressed or at best subordinated all others, whether religious (Anglican, Dissenter, Deist) or literary (satiric, pastoral, georgic) or simply anti-civic humanist. Barrell’s own ...”

“... the Nineties will be a decade of major change. This has set me wondering what kind of reaction George Carey might expect if the plans he had in mind for his own organisation were at all like those being implemented under William Waldegrave. Capitation fees and evangelism budgets for individual priests? The chance for churches to opt out of diocesan ...”

“... to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her starting-point here would seem to be George Eliot’s contention that the novel’s highest end is the extension of human sympathy. This noble purpose is the goal to which all the novel’s art (its ‘form’) is directed. Hardy deliberately employs the vague word ‘feeling’ in preference to ...”

“... with Haig and Robertson that the war could only be won on the Western Front and those, like Lloyd George and Churchill, who believed in ‘knocking away the props’ – but between those who believed in a traditional British strategy of minimal military and maximal economic contribution, of harbouring economic strength in support of Continental allies who ...”

“... wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd. know what I think of criticism in general & not try to arouse my interest with a perfectly ...”

“... teaching of Islam and the words of the message of the Koran can possibly justify the slaughter.’ George W. Bush joined in: ‘Islam’s teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith.’ Blair’s handling and discussion of the Koran was highly ...”