“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of being overtaken by the Liberal-SDP Alliance. In 1992 Labour won 271 seats, regained much of its urban support, and polled twice as many votes as the Alliance. Perhaps more significantly, Kinnock had taken on and defeated Militant, and, in a (literally) bruising campaign, despatched the hard Left. All of this required considerable courage. There is no doubt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... platform for his articles on the breakdown of English civilisation, complete with swipes at Lloyd George and his perfidious controllers, the Northcliffe press, bankers, Prussians and Jews. Converting to his master’s Roman Catholicism, Cecil also adopted his antisemitism, which emerges when he remarks in his rather patronising little book on his brother that ...”

“... furrier goes mad. The joke may be on status-conscious furriers, or it may be an early reaction to urban anonymity, but it shows a curious lack of belief in one’s private personality. In normal Medieval circumstances your identity was guaranteed by the crowd. It would take a very bold person to stand out against such continuous pressure – and that answers ...”

“... of a hidden world exposed, one of the many ‘organic communities’ which evoked nostalgia in an urban reading public. But it was also a society dominated by taboos, oppressed by injustice and reduced to the point of disappearance by poverty and emigration. MacGill’s stereotyped lyricism and outright, if not outraged, realism was a potent blend in the era ...”

“... Not to expose your true feelings to an adult,’ wrote George Orwell, ‘seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.’ This is only one of several difficulties facing the historian of childhood: children are secretive, and parents seldom suspect the range of their fears and excitements. Describing his rather tortured teenage life, Bertrand Russell’s autobiography stresses that while outwardly well-behaved, he ‘found living at home only endurable at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me ...”

“... the two most important architects of the Versailles peace settlement, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, both acknowledged Mazzini’s inspiration. According to Lloyd George, ‘the map of Europe as we see it today is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality ... He taught us not merely the rights ...”

“... as he often said, ‘everything is music.’ In his work, the usual distinctions of form – urban and country, jazz and classical, composed and improvised, sacred and profane, electric and acoustic – dissolved. It’s no wonder he got on so well with Jacques Derrida, another slayer of binary oppositions. There was a racial subtext to Coleman’s ...”

“... the displacement over and over (and over) in his fiction. Here are the boy David Kern’s parents, George and Elsie, fighting about it in the early story ‘Pigeon Feathers’: Mother’s anger touched David’s face; his cheeks burned guiltily. Just by staying in the living room he associated himself with his father. She appeared in the doorway with red ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the ...”

“... various more or less unseemly flirtations with social Darwinism and eugenics, into the uplands of urban planning and house-building in the 20th century. A third thread follows the long and winding story of changing understandings of and policies on poverty, from the New Poor Law’s identification of poverty with individual laziness or degeneracy to the late ...”

“... an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through two immensely long trials in the early ...”

“... editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in Karl’s estimation, could reveal a country source, a little Scotland or Ireland or ...”