“... store clerks or in the Seattle streets, sleeping it off under the highway with the other ‘urban Indians’ who can’t make their way home. But though their landscape is bleak, these first two books share a kind of warmhearted, comic brutality. ‘Your father was always half crazy,’ Victor’s mother tells him. ‘And the other half was on ...”

“... he is just beginning to write the prospectus for the ‘somewhere a dog barked’ school of eerie, urban fiction. The second Appendix struck a personal chord with me. All it does is describe the rules and display the coloured playing cards for ‘Action Baseball’, a game Auster devised during his scamming and scheming period to hustle some extra cash. I’ve ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as a humanitarian mission. The ...”

“... and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic nor narrowly ...”

“... appeal: namely, an eerie topicality. At its simplest, it is a novel about the city of New York, an urban monster that devours its citizens. Wolfe’s hero is a WASP, Yale graduate, Wall street investment banker, called Sherman McCoy. Thirty-eight years old, and over-extended on a million a year, McCoy is a yuppie, to use a term Wolfe studiosly doesn’t ...”

“... Murder Mystery) Awake in Spain is a hotchpotch of shepherds, Audenesque pastoral airmen, urban gay camp, Shakespearean aristocrats-in-the-woods and what William Empson called the child-as-swain: TWO SHEPHERDS: We love the country, that’s why we’re handsome, it’s love love love love love. We only quarrel over sheep. We’re terribly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”