“... 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 ...”

“... product but rather the distinctive mode of merchandising Tupperware that would make its real mark on American – and later, world – culture. For Earl Tupper’s products, though widely admired by design professionals, did not sell particularly well. True, Time magazine reported that a Massachusetts mental hospital found the durable polyethylene dishes ...”

“... features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem’. Ackroyd sees heterogeneity as one of London’s defining characteristics, and his work is constructed accordingly. Beginning with ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its beauty lay in the way that it united this brisk technocracy of the spirit with a pastoral, pre-urban insistence on literature as myth. Myth, that is to say, in the post-Nietzschean sense of a source of primordial wisdom incomparably deeper than any drably discursive knowledge. A scrupulously categorising, religious-humanist criticism could thus have its ...”

“... and the state-owned oil company, Sonangol, recently announced that the two million barrels a day mark is about to be reached – helped by $23 billion of foreign investment over the next five years. Nigeria currently produces 2.3 million barrels per day – but it has more than ten times Angola’s population. Between them, Angola and Nigeria will supply 20 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stare, became angry and profane, hallucinated crawling bugs on his clothes and by the 170-hour mark was accusing the sleep scientists of poisoning his food and framing him for unspecified crimes. In the end he fled the experiment with several doctors in pursuit. When he did finally manage to sleep, he was wired up to Dement’s EEG machine and had one of ...”

“... their princes at times of war might pick up weapons when necessary.In a fascinating section on urban minstrelsy, Rastall (who wrote most of the chapters) draws on records from civic authorities and guilds to describe some of the duties assigned to minstrels employed by towns. They were paid for their work through regular taxation and appeared at both ...”

“... Even though the immediate negative impact will be smaller, areas outside the South of England and urban centres may find it considerably more difficult to adjust because they are poorer to start with. That was one lesson of the financial crisis: London and the South-East were hardest hit, but they recovered much more strongly than less affluent areas. The ...”

“... to find in his hands three or four or five books whose shared aesthetic and thematic concerns mark a distinct shift from those which have preceded them, and which afford the reviewer the singular privilege of announcing a new school of writing. It’s an idea, an image really, which has attracted me ever since I read Edmund Wilson’s early reviews of ...”

“... is in step exactly with his eight years of childhood, from four to 12, in a working-class urban community in the middle of the 20th century. The language of ‘Joe Laughed’ is slightly different, not because it is a different tale, or because the man who wrote it was different, but because the character is different, almost an adult. Most other ...”

“... be the most famous bass-player of all – ahead even of such fancy fingerpickers as Jack Bruce or Mark King – because on a Hendrix record you can hear every note he plays – in the next room, and through the soles of your shoes. You might have gone to an Experience gig to see Hendrix set fire to his guitar; you also went to hear – no, to have your aorta ...”

“... decency and professionalism of those very doctors whose behaviour it deplores (it is an intriguing mark of the lack of ambivalence surrounding the notion of professionalism in the United States that it should be considered much less offensive to accuse the majority of one’s colleagues of enslavement by a philosophically warped world view than merely to ...”