“... of the first lipogram; Ausonius, master of the cento; Arnaut Daniel, inventor of the sestina; George Herbert for his emblematic poems; Edgar Allan Poe (the Philosophy of Composition); Lewis Carroll; Raymond Roussel; Unica Zürn, sublime anagrammatist’. Oulipianism, in short, is not cliquish: it demonstrates its generic credentials by being found to ...”

“... that their territorial rivalries were a continuation, not only of earlier forms of gang ritual in urban working-class neighbourhoods, but also of the violent territorial conflicts of pre-industrial village society. Pearson also challenges the belief that the two world wars created stability and cohesion on the home front. The Great War was accompanied by a ...”

“... he makes a good and still largely unfashionable case for Victorian ‘restorers’, notably Sir George Gilbert Scott. It emerges that the villains were often the relevant Dean and Chapter, who then told some shocking lies in order to transfer responsibility from themselves to their architects. He very reasonably asks why we should think late medieval ...”

“... the villages of Western Europe and the United States gradually becomes that of retail outlets for urban raiders in search of ‘antiques’, it is understandable that Nazi ‘antiques’ should become up-market commodities. Few other objects make so wide a variety of emotional appeals. They are associated with strange, dramatic events, with great personal ...”

“... the major cities. Even as late as the 1960s, Irish county associations flourished in the American urban environment: Boston, New York and San Francisco had separate groupings of this kind for emigrants from each of Ireland’s 32 counties. This formidable presence was backed up both by the Ancient Order of Hibernians (which was a largely church-linked ...”

“... 81 seconds of their beating of King had been videotaped by a resident in a nearby apartment, George Holliday. What Holliday did with the tape was momentous. He did not hand it over to the Police. Had he done so, there would have been an internal tribunal, and most likely some stern disciplinary action. There might also have been judicial control over the ...”

“... germane to their investigation and must be exhaustively scrutinised before being ruled out. George Eliot talked about the human need to filter, lest madness ensue: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the ...”

“... and gentry every year’. In December 1797, a belief in divine control of human events led George III to order a general thanksgiving for recent British naval victories. One preacher who took part thanked God for whipping up a gale at a key moment, thereby thwarting a Dutch landing of ten thousand men on the coast of Scotland. No doubt he convinced his ...”

“... bankruptcy of the old establishment is difficult to exaggerate. In May 1941, Liddell records Lloyd George’s manoeuvres for a separate peace with Germany – all fatally undermined by his determination that this should also secure his re-entry to the cabinet on his terms. One notes with despair the presence in Lloyd ...”

“... their own sacred topography. The driving force was the cult of martyrs and the building of urban churches to contain their relics. It set in motion a long process by which Catholic Christianity would construct a new geography of the sacred. By the later Middle Ages, the European landscape was dotted with thousands of churches, chapels and ...”

“... famous son is puzzling. Despite the rise in Mackintosh’s reputation, Glasgow contrived to plan urban motorways which threatened both his Martyrs’ and Scotland Street Schools. In 1950, the Corporation had been encouraged to buy the lease of the Ingram Street Tea Rooms with its varied set of interiors designed for Kate Cranston which, had it ...”

“... unfavourably to the Mississippi Valley, which had allowed a harmonious civil society to take root. George Kennan, who did visit South America, used what he imagined to be the natural violence of the Amazon basin as a metaphor for the dismal history of Spanish and Portuguese America, especially its disastrous racial intermixing: ‘The handicaps to ...”

“... Murray types his poems with a crooked finger, broken in a childhood struggle with his cousin George. As Murray’s depressed mother suffered successive miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she grew increasingly stern towards her only son, who was sent to live in a boarding house at Taree, New South Wales, where he went to secondary school. He was there ...”

“... they live in community, but unlike them they pursue their mission out on the streets. Friars are urban types, while monks are mostly rural. Their original aim was to liberate theology from the cloisters and colleges so it could become what this book calls ‘a multi-tasking practice in the streets’. Dominicans in particular combine preaching and ...”

“... with the construction of fortifications and military highways in the Highlands begun under George Wade in the 1720s and 1730s. On Roy’s detailed maps, the past and present were visibly united in one imperial enterprise. The close connection between conquest and civility suggested by the (Roman and Hanoverian) subjugation of Scotland was not always ...”