“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”