“... 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 ...”

“... Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the shoddy detritus of ‘progress’ and requiring the skills of the then fashionable figure, the ...”

“... rapacious, furious, joyous, bereft. Her singing was at once ravishing and lacerating; it left its mark. ‘She didn’t sing jazz, because in jazz you have to submit to the force of the band – it’s a collective experience and I don’t think Nina liked to play like that. I think she liked it to be about her,’ the African-American music and cultural ...”

“... in favour of refurbishment. It had originally planned to replace 528 flats with only 120 homes.Mark Slater, a tenant activist who lives on a high floor of one of the Seven Sisters, showed me round his flat. He’s a 72-year-old single man and doesn’t live in luxury, but he has a home. The windows look out on the town below and the moors, Saddleworth and ...”

“... craze – proved to be an essentially Elizabethan phenomenon. I would place its high-water mark in the year 1599, when A Warning for Fair Women was staged at the Globe. Over at the Rose, a hundred yards away down Maiden Lane, three new murder plays were commissioned by the Lord Admiral’s Men. The first of these was Page of Plymouth by Jonson and ...”

“... account of Sendero’s structure and organisation. Michael Smith provides an assessment of its urban strategy that will do little to cheer the Peruvian authorities. Smith reveals that by mid-1990, Sendero had secured its beachhead in Lima and developed a sophisticated strategy to mobilise the support of slum-dwellers. Gustavo Gorriti describes the ...”

“... portals between the body and the material world – the eyes, nose, lips, ears and hands – to mark the end of the senses’ dealings with the things of the earth. Conversely, fat coming out of the body, in decomposition, is disturbing and disgusting. Fat that is excreted by animals and used as manure feeds crops that then go into human bodies, but that is ...”

“... two halves of Leigh Hunt’s life and to ignore the second. Hunt was born in 1784, and the halfway mark is deemed to come with Shelley’s drowning and beach cremation in 1822. Hunt died in 1859. Nicholas Roe’s book is not the place to go for news of the Victorian Leigh Hunt and his relations with the young Tennyson, the ...”

“... of delectable memories of rural Wicklow, this is rarely held against him by the militantly modern, urban Irish literati, as it is sometimes held against authors like Brian Friel and Seamus Deane. This is because in their case, but not in his, the backward glance to rural Ireland is associated with a currently unfashionable republicanism. On Canaan’s Side is ...”

“... fantastic raiment, pushing and pulling the body into every shape and contour, is a defining mark of human intelligence and ingenuity – alongside language, writing and laughter. We poor, bare, forked animals, we featherless chickens, as Plato called us, have covered ourselves with multi-coloured hose, beribboned and ruffled partlets, wide-brimmed ...”

“... and city, full of a Romantic yearning for the moors and likely to have witnessed a good deal of urban destitution. According to Christine Alexander, the erudite, meticulous editor of this volume, there were 18 small textile mills in Haworth alone. The children were bred in the womb of industrial modernity, among the smokestacks of early Victorian ...”

“... Historically, the Anglo-Irish were landed gentry, with their eyes turned to England. Urban Protestant business was more a class splinter with interests and allegiances of its own; it unquestioningly supported the Union, but was far less obsessed with England as a cultural model. Cronin here makes a start on something we badly need – an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or ‘The Black Hole of East London’ to the Victorian press, and were the subject of exposés by urban missionaries who described how they slept, on occasion as many as fifty of them at a time, on the floors of damp and freezing tar-boiling sheds in the middle of winter. By 1940 lascars made up more than a quarter of the Merchant Navy. A large proportion of ...”

“... say, and pull out your road-map to work out a different route. It would help a lot if the AA would mark ‘unrest areas’ on those maps. Perhaps they soon will. These are extreme, not typical, experiences, but they are also sufficiently common to be just part of life. There is no denying the vengeful and destructive temper of the ‘lost generation’ of ...”