“... 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 ...”

“... of the Bible translated into German by Martin Luther. All of this testifies to a flourishing urban cultural life in the late medieval and early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a display of the many different coins issued by ...”

“... It was in the Granada interiors that Carter first encountered romantic fantasy set amid modern urban street life, just as it would be in her own work. Like the neo-medieval mansion where the kidnapped Fevvers is taken, on whose front the ‘raw brick showed through the ivy’, Carter’s best effects could be summed up as South Circular Gothic. The ...”

“... water pumps.   Problems in production have been compounded by difficulties in distribution … Urban areas with high concentrations of Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) members and government officials have received preferential allocations, and it has been claimed that military stockpiling continues. For those who were not Party members or in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... industrial estates, and the home-made signs (‘Buy British’, ‘Our Beef With Blair’) that mark the transition, you will find yourself in another England, barely inhabited, tranquil, timeless. It is easy to see yourself in this world; its unruffled surface seems to reflect a clearer picture of who you are, free of the distorting pressures of ...”

“... to create’. Sober liberal observers, like the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and Diana Raby, suggest that a truly popular socialism ...”

“... He had a wedding ring, and so, barring any recent tragedies, there was a spouse who had seen this mark as recently as this morning. I imagined her (you may think me presumptuous to assume that his spouse was a woman, given my own particular circumstances, but there was something in his demeanour that suggested to me that he had never touched a man without ...”

“... to the baptism of Catarina, daughter of Lowijs and Esperance.Recovered from the sediment of urban bureaucracy – notarial records, marriage banns, cemetery and baptismal registers – these interconnections amount to evidence of what Mark Ponte, whose archival work has brought them to light, calls an Afro-Atlantic ...”

“... about something by Butterfield, is unflattering. ‘Not a small church’ raises a large question mark over the success of W.J. Hopkins’s St Eadburga’s, Worcester. The use of negatives is sparing but effective. ‘Widely unknown’ (describing a minor architect) is one of the best.By the end of the project Pevsner felt that he was too tired and the ...”

“... otherwise is, as Harryboy Boas says in Alexander Baron’s novel The Lowlife (1963), ‘the mark of the outsider’. Rather, Hackney is the first step out, geographically and socially, ‘a Victorian-Edwardian suburb swallowed up by London, broad streets, little villas and big tradesmen’s houses; and now, among these, little factories and workshops ...”

“... foretells in gruesome detail the destruction and depopulation of Alexandria, the rewilding of its urban spaces along the Mediterranean coast and the restoration of Egyptian self-rule. The girdle-wearers, ‘being followers of Typhon’ (the Greek name for Seth, the Egyptian god of Chaos), ‘will slay themselves’, he says, imagining the stench of unburied ...”

“... is ‘beautiful’, the concept of beauty dissolves – it is so much the sentimentality of an urban culture that fears what it has lost.In the fashion-needy world of American film, Malick was in danger of being forgotten. And Bleasdale sees no reason to claim he was hurt by that or felt compelled to return to work. Still, after twenty years he did ...”

“... there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the bin. I blocked all the holes I could see and hoped that would be the end of the matter. But for months afterwards I was haunted by thoughts of rats. At night, I imagined I could hear the ...”