“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... systematically dynamited most of the remaining city, leaving it the most extensively demolished urban area in Europe. The uprising failed to achieve any military or political objective: in a memoir, Czeslaw Milosz condemned it as ‘an unforgivably reckless act’. Around 180,000 civilians were killed, among them many of Poland’s elite, who might later ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... went flat; it seemed a thing of the past. Not anymore: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman come to life again, and this reanimation is charged by the female company they now keep, once overlooked peers such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. At the same time, in these bigger spaces the Minimalist installations by Donald ...”

“... is only one possible way of making sense of it. As well as exploring the fantastic in a modern, urban context, he also paid attention to those things we might not ordinarily categorise as ‘real’ – dreams, fantasies and bogeymen – but that are real enough in their own way, if we alter our perspective. A man wanders the streets of Berlin and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from 18th-century Prussian forestry to agrarian reforms in the Soviet Union and Tanzania and urban planning in Brazil and India, Scott developed a theory of ‘high modernist’ state power which, through cadastral surveys and monocrops and grands boulevards, tried to impose order on society and nature, and in doing so destroyed everything that made them ...”

“... because Reagan wouldn’t have approved. Some contemporary sex therapists claim that their urban patients are increasingly turning to their pets for sexual gratification, unable or unwilling to find it with humans.‘Bestiality’ covers a wide range of acts, objects, fetishes, desires and motivations. While sex with ‘companion animals’ – dogs ...”

“... intimate disquiet about waste is liable to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care ...”

“... still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ...”

“... So instead of Ciao!, Single!, Girlfriend!, Spritzer! and Bloke, we’re going with Career Woman, Urban Gent, Man Hug, Pheromone and Car.’ Satirists diagnose rather than prescribe: they clear weeds with a flamethrower but offer no suggestions about planting. This is the genre that relies most on Nietzsche’s notion of the destructive impulse also being a ...”

“... describes his critical study of Mrs Dalloway as a guide to the novel’s ‘inner life’. Mark Hussey’s is subtitled ‘Biography of a Novel’. What next for the literary masterpiece, one wonders. Birthday cards? A retirement gong?Daunted by the hullabaloo, I was relieved to come across the wispy voice of Leonard Woolf, asked in an interview ...”