“... rhythms of nature, consume resources sparingly, reduce the human population and do something about urban blight. It contains people who worry about the ozone layer, lead in petrol, and radioactive waste, people obsessed with recycling paper and people who like the Green Belt because it preserves property values. Pretty well everybody can be considered a friend ...”

“... mean, selfish, and thinks only of herself.’ According to Hadda, this isn’t so far off the mark. The family often noted that both Singer and his wife were frugal and ungenerous. On the other hand, for the first 21 years of their marriage, Alma supported them both, selling dresses at Arnold Constable, Macy’s and Lord & Taylor. She seems to have been ...”

“... of religious life in France’. ‘Renewal of religious death’ would have been closer to the mark. Then, on 16 October 1943, came the round-up of Rome’s Jews – the oldest community in Europe. Even the German Ambassador, to his great credit, was horrified by the impending atrocity and put his neck on the block by explaining to Pacelli how best to use ...”

“... and tales among a public that was having all the usual trouble adjusting to an increasingly urban way of life. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had appeared in 1888; his Irish Fairy and Folk Tales in 1894. Jack Dunne came to visit the sick woman and said quite simply: ‘That is not Bridgie Boland.’ The being before him in the bed ...”

“... Composers’ Collective – a New York-based Communist cell which included among its associates Mark Blitzstein, Earl Robinson and Aaron Copland. The Collective took its cue from the militant anthems of Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, composing American versions of 12-tone protest songs: ‘The Strange Funeral at Braddock’ gives the full Modernist ...”

“... bind audiences ever more closely to the famous people they seem to dwell among. Counteracting urban and immigrant alienation, Reaves writes, celebrity caricature created an ‘almost familial connection to prominent public figures’. Excited by modernity, speed and dissonant juxtaposition, celebrity caricature made the immigrant cosmopolitan metropolis ...”

“... the complications of which often throttled the aspirations of the most powerful and headstrong. Urban demographers can trace in its pages the movements, migrations and preferred areas of newcomers. Planters and nabobs, we learn, tended to find houses in Soho Square or to colonise Marylebone. Denmark Hill became ‘Little Germany’. Jews sought out the once ...”

“... in the way people snoop, pilfer, spy and pry, but of late she has taken up kidnap, blackmail and urban terrorism as if these were the same things on a larger scale. This is a pity in a way, because it makes for complicated plots, and the best of the books are not over-plotted: but it reflects the temperament of a writer who has said she mistrusts indignant ...”

“... intolerable wrestle with words and feelings, a contest which it barely contrives to win. It is a mark of the Victorian novel’s maturity that at this historical period the form becomes ‘reflexive’ and analyses the nature of the feelings which it has always been able to articulate, and to generate in its readers. Hardy conceives the masterworks of ...”

“... and written language, the traditional mode of communication and of adjustment to the conditions of urban living. Half of the people were illiterate in any case. It was the caricaturists’ achievement that they gave faces to the faceless crowd, a non-verbal means by which the people were oriented and given a sense of individual and class identity, for into the ...”

“... Preface, anyone seriously studying it (or for that matter the 1800 edition) will miss footnotes to mark where material was added in 1802. Two new critical books illustrate the range and diversity of present historical work on Wordsworth and Coleridge. Susan Eilenberg goes into the deep relationship between the collaborating authors that Mason puts ...”

“... of duty overseas. When property restrictions on entry into military service were relaxed, the urban proletariat and the newly landless joined the legions and learned to save their loyalty not for the Roman state but for the commanders on whom their salary and discharge bonus depended. It had all culminated in civil war and murderous proscriptions when the ...”

“... by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion’. Parry does not mention Urquhart’s particular enthusiasm for the Turkish ...”

“... for us to live here, surely He would have given us webbed feet. Or gills. Or cold blood. The urban legend has alligators tenanting swimming pools. Possums, armadillos and raccoons – respectively, stupid, armoured or clever creatures – out and about. Bacchus will know his own. The oft-noted absence of seasons, though a kind of unbearable monsoonish ...”

“... important matter to him’; Mrs Gaskell placed ‘rag-and-bone warehouses’ next to those other urban emporia of recycling, pawn-brokers’ shops; and almost sixty years before Yeats, James Russell Lowell had already seen that literature itself was the random stuff of visceral alchemy: ‘The somewhat greasy heap of the literary rag-and-bone picker is ...”