“... has analogies with another new theatrical fashion: the ‘humours comedy’ of the mid 1590s – George Chapman’s An Humorous Days Mirth (1597) and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) are well-known examples – and the slicker, smuttier ‘city comedies’ of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston et al, which follow slightly later. Like the ...”

“... extraordinary success was interpreted as an anomaly. She styled herself as a Romantic genius like George Sand, to whom she was constantly compared, and seemed to transcend the constraints of her sex.‘Women’s rights! – women’s nonsense!’ she complained in the 1850s. ‘Women should seek to establish their rights by good and great works, and not by ...”

“... are the interconnecting stories of fictitious people in American films, and whose narrator is George Bailey – the James Stewart character from It’s a wonderful life. The family romance is the construction George Bailey discovers in, or reads into, the plots of the films noirs ...”

“... other contexts, scattered through Wordsworth’s poetry and usually involving pastoral rather than urban landscapes, in which the poet responds to what he sees with a combination of deep excitement and calm, calm hovering on the edge of ecstasy’. Miller’s Thomas Hardy, published a year before the Wordsworth article, has the subtitle ‘Distance and ...”

“... of the sort of Communist culture that has been difficult to excavate since it was buried by George Orwell and his innumerable followers in the British intelligentsia, for whom the entire Communist episode was a criminal enterprise undertaken by middle-class cultists. The figures who were at the helm of the AIA – Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... story of English architecture comes, in 1830, to a natural halting-place’ with the death of George IV, it was ‘scarcely … a place where one would wish to halt for long’. At no other point, he wrote, had architecture been ‘so feeble, so deficient in genius, so poor in promise’. The problem was that patronage had got into the wrong hands. He ...”

“... beasts in foul holding-pens filled with shit, straw and stench; of the callous, jeering crowd – urban sophisticates and country bumpkins alike – thronging to Bedlam in their thousands to view the splendid entertainment offered by the spectacle of the raging and raving mad. Generations of Whiggish historians, celebrating the Victorian asylum as a triumph ...”

“... and, despite the growing prevalence among his audiences of a neoclassical taste for satirical urban realism, throughout his career he scripted scenes in which Hymen personally ratifies the ending of a comedy, or Hercules abandons Antony, or Jupiter descends on an eagle. The first published review of his work, in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit ...”

“... while giving them a taste of disrespectful oratory, and second to introduce Germany’s hopelessly urban intellectuals to their own country, their own compatriots. We did a Grassian bus party in 1997, raising the wind for the referendum that would bring back a Scottish Parliament. Two differences from Germany: we made use of the Scottish fondness for music and ...”

“... on Wes Anderson’s 2009 animated version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Voiced smoothly by George Clooney, this fox is a gallant, wolf-phobic gentleman, a dreamer who writes a newspaper column and suffers an existential crisis that involves one master plan, three bandit hats and lots of gear. He doesn’t have much in common with the medieval ...”

“... and gender affirmation surgery. The people documented in these books were rich and poor, rural and urban, fixed and itinerant, literate and illiterate, French, British and American. Some had sex with men, some with women, some with both, some with no one at all. Almost all were white and, Manion shows, on the rare occasions when journalists and police did ...”

“... built in your neighbourhood.’ The pitch to the suburbs was also a way of calling to mind the urban riots that followed the police killing of George Floyd last summer. These outbreaks – euphemistically referred to as ‘unrest’ by the liberal press – were recurrent in Minneapolis, Austin, Philadelphia, New York ...”

“... had votes. It was all the more necessary for property to pay its ‘ransom’. In Britain, Lloyd George was the greatest exponent of radical prudence. Labour’s great victory in 1945 was based on an alliance of the poor working classes of the North with sections of the urban middle classes and the more prosperous working ...”

“... of universal knowledge. In this demanding, 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 ...”