“... 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 For the rich, chartering a ship to take large groups has been replaced by chartering a plane.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... petition on change.org calling for a reduction in petrol prices. Ludosky works in a built-up, peri-urban landscape (beyond the capital and the banlieues), where car travel is a necessity. She’s also a perfect fit for Macron’s vision of a new, striving France full of initiative-takers from all walks of life, including minorities: a thirty-something black ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... South, he was not born, reared and trained there. His ethnic roots are Italian, his predilections urban and Yankee, his political nurturing leftist. ‘I am a native New Yorker who was born and raised in New York City and who has spent all except the last eight of his 63 years as a resident of New York State.’ Throughout his colourful younger ...”

“... long, interminable post-Renaissance crises in Italy and later distinctions between urban and rural crises’), he prefers displays of verbal fireworks: indeed, his style is infected by the baroque effusions from which he quotes. The titles of his essays are in the mode made popular by the Annales school of historians, bizarre and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... laid on for passing tourists and in the West that’s just what it would be: a folk park or an urban farm. Cairo, 10 January. One of the company, Diana H., spent her honeymoon in Cairo. The marriage did not last long and when she learned she was to be filming in Cairo she wondered where the unit would be staying. It was the Ramses Hilton, where she had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... o’t hae ye hid oot by?’ The most obvious point, of course, is that Scots is used especially to mark speakers from the lower classes. Complementary points are implied by the late John Thomas Low, writing on the wealth (or at least number) of modern historical plays in Scots – if you want to have Scots-speaking characters who are not peasants, you must go ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”