“... in the Bolshevik underground in Baku. Martov, the Menshevik leader, was probably closer to the mark in 1918 when he accused Stalin of having carried out bank robberies (‘expropriations’) to finance party activities, although on this, as on quite a few other unresolved points in Stalin’s biography, McNeal appears to have no opinion. On several ...”

“... in the mind is the glum portrait of Personville, nick-named ‘Poisonville’, the claustrophobic urban badland, with gangsters in hats and 1920s roadsters, spraying bullets the way blurb-writers spray praise. The Dain Curse, from later the same year, looks like an implausible extravaganza. Originally published, like Red Harvest, as four separate Black Mask ...”

“... in his sense of the autonomy of ideas – suggesting the style of that last of the literati, Mark Pattison – but if we reify Scottish wissenschaft with the political history of the place we can go far towards accounting for the power of present intellectual developments. One element of this is straightforwardly political. The 1707 Union didn’t mean ...”

“... often to have indicated obscenity and buffoonery, lust, luck and fertility; others were used to mark senility (when pendulous), otherness (when circumcised) and self-control. They were a symbol as much for women as for men and figured in a number of women-only festivals in the form of phallic costumes and phallic cakes. Some care was taken to distinguish ...”

“... of the time ‘a dark horse, little known before his forties beyond narrow circles of local and urban ornithology’. Men of the middling middle class were starting to make their mark. So, too, were boys from the grammar schools. Confined at home, disinclined to sport, keen on facts, and in our pubic confusions finding an ...”

“... to him in the night on the bed and sucked him.’ She even searched his body for the devil’s mark when he was asleep. Convinced that her husband had murdered their son Samuel by witchcraft, in order to make her work longer hours, she had no inhibition about publicising her fears. Parsons did nothing to allay the mounting suspicion. Reluctant to settle a ...”

“... of a minute’s silence. Over lunch in the staffroom that day, three teachers said they wouldn’t mark Paty’s death in class. One teacher had considered it but decided against. Another teacher refused to consider it. Commemorative silence was a blunt instrument, she said, which would make her students think they were supposed to feel guilt by ...”

“... jostled in a crowd. It suggests that no new Troy needs to be sacked for a city to be lost; that urban planners, civil architects and the commodification of culture are more than sufficient to alienate its inhabitants. It also explicitly addresses what had long been one of Benjamin’s central concerns. His greatest early work, The Origin of German Baroque ...”

“... and proud of it: as a 1934 newspaper article noted with some satisfaction during celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of the delimitation, Soviet border-drawing had allowed the populations of Central Asia to ‘become closer to the family of Soviet nations who are building socialism’ by enabling ‘tribe, an ethnographic category, to be transformed ...”

“... return to the Quai d’Orsay, Georges-Picot bequeathed another document to the Levant. He and Sir Mark Sykes, representing Great Britain, gave their names to an accord that would parcel out the Ottomans’ Arab dominions into European protectorates, or mandates, as the League of Nations euphemism had it, which eventually became states – or, as the Egyptian ...”

“... neighbouring communities into a single much larger unit, what modern prehistorians call ‘proto-urban’ Rome. But the original nuclei were still in some sense separate; walls surrounding the Palatine and dated to about 730 BC were discovered in 1988. By then, the inhabitants and their Latin and Etruscan neighbours must have been long familiar with traders ...”

“... President Andrew Johnson in 1869 and has been the subject of bitter jokes ever since. Looters in urban riots a century later claimed their loot was their 40 acres, promising to ‘be back for the mules’. In relation to other claims, Barkan stresses that the amount of money claimed must be substantial enough to be taken seriously; but when it comes to ...”

“... to adapt or die, but none is so emblematic of a single historic period. Spanning the high-water mark of the industrial revolution, the department store was the offspring and ornament of the most cosmopolitan cities of 19th-century Europe: London, Paris and the newly conjoined Budapest. Into the 20th century, streamlined glass and chrome in the Schocken ...”

“... share of public housing of any advanced economy outside the Communist bloc’. An overwhelmingly urban, rent-paying population had lost its connection to land and a feeling for what it could do. Nobody quoted Mark Twain: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it any more.’ Nobody explained, as Christophers does here, that ...”

“... fact that city-killer weapons arrived at the precise moment that humanity became a predominantly urban species.Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in war since 1945, but there have been many close calls. In 1956, a B-47 bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean with two nuclear weapons on board. It was never found. In 1960, US nuclear early warning systems ...”