“... 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 ...”

“... very longue durée (he likes the phrase ‘deep time’) and embeds modern inventions, such as the urban garden cemetery, the war memorial in situ, and the crematorium, in a far-reaching and widely geographical cultural history that ranges from the Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians, where the loved one was left to be pecked clean by vultures, to the ...”

“... in the configuration of the Labour vote. In 1945, for example, Labour’s weakest performances in urban Britain were in Greater Liverpool and Greater Glasgow, because sectarianism was still a dynamic element in their politics. In 1997 Labour’s strongest performances in urban Britain were in Greater Liverpool and Greater ...”

“... a wall. Houses are hung with lights on the pilgrim’s return, celebrations and communal eating mark the occasion, congratulatory visits by other families are expected, gifts are distributed, stories told, photos passed around in bulging albums. For the rich, chartering a ship to take large groups has been replaced by chartering a plane. For those of more ...”

“... crush the insurgency. Reporting the point of view of the nationalist population, especially in the urban ghettos where the IRA was most active, now posed a much greater problem for the BBC, since the main target of their anger was the British army. Every report on allegations of brutality was greeted with howls of outrage from Westminster MPs, who accused the ...”

“... become the centre of a multimedia network with soft tentacles spread throughout North America’s urban fabric, from news-stands to television stations, clubs and hotels.’ She portrays Hefner, reclining on his couch like Delacroix’s Sardanapalus, as a scrawny spider at the centre of a huge web that now envelops us all. Hefner was the founder and director ...”

“... extraordinary appeal in his final years lay precisely in his ability to bridge gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of ...”

“... past are a little disingenuous, for sombre reflections on ecology and meditative analyses of time mark this as a book with a finger on the pulse of the Eighties. Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time comes to mind, or Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, warmly acknowledged here: Atwood’s book maps an intellectual location for itself. Its emotional impetus ...”

“... out, they show Labour and Conservative running virtually neck-and-neck at around the 35 per cent mark, with the Alliance slumped back to 28 per cent. The urban riots which punctuated the conference season may be part of the explanation for this. The absence of the Government during the long recess sometimes makes the ...”

“... and economically more advanced nations, representing the alienating machine age. The modern, urban, industrial world, associated with the West, is the great materialistic, patriarchal, meat-eating destroyer of traditional village life, where everyone knew his or her place and lived in blissful, spiritual peace. Never mind that traditional village life ...”

“... took them over, raised families, and bred the population back to its earlier and ‘natural’ mark around twenty million. The period 1450-1550 was accordingly one of growth and relative ease for the peasant classes. By 1550 this was over, and France had moved into a ‘Malthusian’ world, trapped in a vicious circle of inefficient agriculture. Everyone ...”

“... for his uncle, the businessman Alexander Scott. For these eclectic experiences to leave their mark on his work, mere exposure was not enough; I suspect the reason Leskov still haunts the purgatory of reputations is that he sacrificed a portion of his ego on the altar of doubt. While Tolstoy set his face consistently against modernity and Platonov, in some ...”

“... and good manners had always been polar opposites, for civility was essentially urban, the ethic of civic communities.’ Speaking well was essential, and what were thought to be ‘correct’ varieties of English speech were ever more strictly defined. As civility came to seem more important – and, not coincidentally, as state formation ...”

“... Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly showy. But the Gawain manuscript’s importance is less overt. A dubious acquaintance of mine once ...”