“... 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 ...”

“... profit, to be obtained through the collection of fees and opportunities for patronage.The aim of Mark Knights’s book is to explain why Britain took so long to move from the old conception of office-holding to our present one by showing how the issue was debated over more than two centuries. A historian of the 17th century by training, Knights stresses that ...”

“... late as 1912 the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal said that ‘men continued to see rouge as a mark of sex and sin.’ That same year, however, twenty thousand women, watched by half a million onlookers, marched in New York City for the right to vote: the leaders, who included some society ladies, wore bright red lipstick. The march was joined by Elizabeth ...”

“... of revolution seem very far away in these fragments. As does his eye for hidden aspects of the urban world. In Belgium Disrobed, the only things he seems impressed by are a few churches and cathedrals. One of the few dot-dash notes to lodge in my mind from Late Fragments was jotted down after a visit to a Jesuit church in Brussels: ‘The boudoir of ...”

“... walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an Edwardian sense of excursion, pleasure, time out. Best Value. We, East Londoners, support the Lea, as it supports us, marking our border, shadowing the meridian line. It is ...”

“... clothes, he revels in self-multiplication: ‘Brother, that’s I; that sits for me. Do you mark it? And I must stand here ready to make away myself yonder – I must sit to be killed and stand to kill myself. I could vary it not so little as thrice over again. ’T’as some eight returns like Michaelmas term.’ The dark surreal farce of this moment ...”

“... too blinkered or preoccupied to see. Yet we feel that here the limits of Hans’s awareness also mark the limits of O’Neill’s own – an impression reinforced when you read O’Neill’s non-fiction writing and discover that he writes in his own person much as Hans does, with the same slightly old-fashioned decorum, pointillist vividness and weakness for ...”

“... contingency personified, who enters Henry Perowne’s life in Saturday through that most random of urban events, the car accident. Trauma, in McEwan’s work, inaugurates a loss of innocence. After the mother’s death, the childhood garden is cemented over, in his first novel, and the children, now orphaned, set about creating their own, corrupted version of ...”

“... Mugabe 27 per cent and Makoni 15 per cent. In fact these estimates were based on too narrow an urban sample and were too favourable both to Tsvangirai and Makoni, but the message was clear: Mugabe had lost. Enraged, he ordered the ZEC to declare him elected with 53 per cent. He was also angry at Makoni’s ‘treachery’ and demanded that his vote be ...”

“... characters, a distinctive and highly self-conscious prose style, a time of year, and a milieu of urban self-abuse and disaffection. But there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between the books. I’m glad to have the connection made for me, though, because it affords me the opportunity to consider the totality, so far, of a strange and ...”

“... tunnel, the least unreliable lift, was that the black hole at the epicentre of this vortex of urban restlessness was a necropolis to the age of cinema. The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child vagrant. Global-franchise tramp. Swiss ...”

“... moderate – while feeding off some of the same prejudices. Trump’s racist policies as an urban landlord and Giuliani’s racist pot-stirring as hizzoner were joined at the hip. Post mayoralty, Giuliani insistently blamed and upbraided Black citizens for being the engineers of their own besetting problems, claiming that police shootings were the ...”

“... of meeting him and living in his era. The Russian novelist Sinyavsky was probably closest to the mark when he called Zhivago ‘a weak novel of genius’. The contrast, in a sense, is between the poetry in it – what other novel has for hero a poet who could actually write the candle poem, ‘Winter Night’? – and the prose emotion, which is not up to a ...”

“... than accompany his wife on her shopping trips. But while his comments on modern architecture and urban planning may be sincerely meant, it is right royal naiveté to suppose that Britain’s social and environmental problems can best be solved by turning the whole country into a Canaletto-like theme park. And his concern for the disadvantaged has not exactly ...”

“... the third and fourth centuries represented, as Fleming puts it, Britain’s ‘high-water mark of romanitas’. There were villas in every city and many small towns, some of them enormous and luxurious, like the one at Woodchester near Stroud, with its 8500 square-foot principal room. Some were no doubt occupied by Roman officials, but the majority ...”