“... going mad. In The Emperor’s Children Messud experiments with new forms. Like the 19th-century urban novelists, she represents the range of city life by means of interlocking characters and plots; like the encyclopedic Modernists, she reproduces some of the reviews, interviews and society-page articles that make up the world her novel describes. (The ...”

“... their strong rhythm and lingering nostalgia for a country existence which still existed in most urban workers’ memory. A pungent way with the ‘Lords of Trade’ – ‘They are trampling on the lowly/ They are spurning at the high’ (a One Nation/Young England sentiment) – sounded well in the ears of a confused working class that had gone from one ...”

“... transformation of Irish society by introducing Catholic emancipation at the same time, which George III frustrated because he found it inconsistent with his coronation oath. Indeed, Walker and Greer note that the Protestant Orange Order, established in 1795, opposed legislative union in 1800 precisely because its members thought it would immediately lead ...”

“... editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in Karl’s estimation, could reveal a country source, a little Scotland or Ireland or ...”

“... impressions and cultural meditation that Sebald manages so smoothly is harder to bring off in an urban setting, without the plausibly sustaining medium of solitude. A typical passage in Open City starts firmly anchored in time and place: ‘From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view ...”

“... uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds ... What you have to remember is that art today has become one of the performing arts. Art galleries are places where you go in search of a certain kind of kinky experience. Today’s art gallery is a cross between a church and a disco ... Koons and ...”

“... step, like odd yearnings of the imagination, or unexpected items in a gasoline-smelling dream of urban ruin. I stopped one night in front of the Ferragamo shoe-shop on Fifth Avenue. The light from the shop was so strong it seemed like daylight spilling over the pavement. I felt drenched in the uncanny whiteness. And there in the window, draped on transparent ...”

“... wrote about love, and war, and history, and banditry, but the to and fro between the rural and the urban – between the lives of the roués and guards officers and princesses in St Petersburg and the lives of the family estates that pay for their champagne – underlay everything. The mood of the gentry in the country and the mood of the gentry in the city ...”

“... institutions, especially the new National Gallery, are detached from the sordid realities of urban life. The Royal Academy moved into the east wing of Wilkins’s building in 1837 while the National Gallery occupied the west, opening to the public on 5 April 1838. In the same month the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’s third novel, was ...”

“... cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St George, in the Crimea, to Kalerga, on the Bulgarian shore. Information about the course of the war was brought to the British public with great speed by the Times’s Applegath rotary printing press, which could deliver ten thousand impressions an hour. It’s ...”

“... to accentuate as abate class feeling, as better-off families migrated to leafy suburbs away from urban smells and noise. Working-class women entered those suburban fastnesses not as housewives but as workers, for – interwar moaning about the servant problem notwithstanding – only after 1945 did domestic service go into serious decline. The fact that both ...”

“... fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or ...”

“... that echo Romantic longings, and live according to the dynamics of the countryside rather than the urban ff furioso; she took a meditative turn against ‘the getting and spending [that] lay waste our powers’. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011) by the American writer George Prochnik ...”

“... looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too. Never one to underestimate his own impact, he reported to his second wife, Nowell, that a colleague had said he was ‘one of three English public men who could command the ...”

“... knew. Even royalty could not escape the pressure for a youthful silhouette. The immensely vain George IV found that the glass of fashion would not flatter him as it had Henry VIII, for he lived in an age when monarchs had less power, and fashion, in a society that was increasingly urban and wealthy, had more. The padded ...”