“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... few, so the urge, for critic and biographer alike, is to look for patterns, to trace threads, to mark peaks and troughs – to impose a form, in other words, on the chaos of the work and the life. In the case of Alasdair Gray (who is, in any case, already his own critic and his own biographer), the extent of that chaos is daunting. As Rodge Glass’s book ...”