“... 18 October, precisely at the time when Theroux was eulogising South London on TV as a delightful urban safari park, I was robbed at knife point in Brixton. The frog who dared to croak is Richard Sennett’s first novel and umpteenth book. Like other philosophers (Russell, Wollheim, Scruton, Koestler), he evidently sees fiction as something he ought to chance ...”

“... the rediscovery of patriotism by the British intelligentsia. Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene and George Orwell all undertook patriotic work for the BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely national’. ‘Our culture,’ he ...”

“... of ‘history from below’, such as Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé, even though their Marxism was anathema to him. His magnum opus, on the armées révolutionnaires, the semi-vigilante armed bands who enforced the Terror in the provinces in 1793-4, might, in theory, have formed part of a marxisant ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... pioneered by Southey, Pugin and others, of contrasting the barren squalor of industrial workers’ urban existence with an idealised picture of the settled, organic, hierarchical relations of the Middle Ages. His indictment of the present exhibited not just an intense sympathy with the exploited poor of industrialising Britain, but also a raging condemnation ...”

“... We have one more thing: the most nerve-straining title of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving ...”

“... the reference to the ‘North’. For English Romantics, the question of authenticity broke along urban/rural lines; for German Romantics, the difference was ethno-historical. Hölderlin’s Germans, like Herder’s, are a stunted, half-finished people. But instead of trying to prepare the way for a cultural renaissance, Hölderlin wanted to solve the problem ...”

“... he’d decamped for Europe nearly a decade before. Neon had just arrived on Broadway along with George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good! The lights turned Times Square into a celebration of American individualism (‘name in lights’); the Gershwin songs turned Manhattan into a playground, ‘an isle of joy’. At a stroke, a new ...”

“... saw the demonstration as evidence of the intellectual and emotional sterility induced in the urban Irish by sexual abstinence – something he himself knew a lot about, though apparently not suffering the same effects. As time went by he talked more and more about his distaste for the Dublin populace, which broke up Synge’s play, kept shops or worked ...”

“... and heroic figures of the revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic remained those of the old urban patriciates: Athens, Sparta and above all pre-Imperial Rome. ‘Patriotism’ signified the actual or supposed attitude of ancient aristocratic élites towards their own city-countries, and their opposition to malevolent and obscurantist despots ...”

“... city in the country.’ Such bursts of rural defiance, Kazin observes, were no help in converting urban voters to the cause. The big city politicians returned the disdain. They were Democrats too, but Bryan did not speak to them or their followers. Populist economics constantly touched the great American antinomies. Bryan’s egalitarian campaigns ...”

“... of its state revenue from the export of petroleum. By that point, the country had become heavily urban: 16 of its 19 million people lived in cities, a significant majority below the poverty line, with many in extreme poverty. Most of these urban poor resided in shanty towns sprawling up along the mountain walls that ...”

“... some extent makes up for it. The relations of literacy, religion and education are mapped; so is urban gentrification – no quotes around the word now; the movements of convicts and bushrangers; Aboriginal landscapes and Aboriginal resistance, as well as the more obvious geographies of climate, land use and weather.In the helpful Guide to Sources ...”

“... of London, Maurice Thomson was securing the Thames and fetching vessels from Holland, his brother George – now army colonel and MP for Southwark – manning the perimeter of the South Bank; one of his partners was ensconced as private secretary to Cromwell; a few months later, another was to figure in joint planning with the Levellers for the coup to put an ...”

“... instability’ that threatened access to resources and paved the way for Communist penetration. George Kennan, the theorist of containment, argued that it was ‘better to have a strong regime in power’ in Latin America ‘than a liberal government if it is indulgent’ to Communists. And Washington helped make sure things stayed that way, funding and ...”