“... 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 ...”

“... indigenous population. The two bypasses squeeze the city from either side, leaving the overcrowded urban core to the Palestinians, and the hills and plains of Bethlehem for future settlement expansion. The PLO team at Oslo had no conception of the effects of schemes like the Bethlehem bypass – and indeed disregarded the warnings about the 'matrix of ...”

“... had a doctorate and had written a thesis on Bob Dylan. It also contained excited teenagers. Mark Stewart was a 6’7’’ white boy from Bristol who loved black music. In 1978, aged 17, he and four others formed the Pop Group. The conceptual cockiness of their name hinted at the scale of their ambitions. They intended to fuse the most avant-garde ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hard as an adult, dropping down from fatigue after long days, or sitting up to write or mark examinations after the family had gone to bed. He travelled the ringing grooves of change from city to city and school to school, following the slow, frustrating stages in the development of a national system of elementary education. He was not the architect ...”

“... the impact of circumstances on men. Unlike the old, the ‘new’ history – economic, social, urban and demographic – explores people as categories, groups, statistics, abstractions, rather than as flesh-and-blood beings. ‘Mere’ biography is dismissed as attributing an unmerited significance to the trivial doings of trivial individuals. At best, it ...”

“... and education had more relevance than the socialist programme of small craft producers to an urban society which lacked a modern industrial working class. In fact, Mazzini won an important following among the artisans of Northern and Central Italy, and after Unification his supporters were the first to create an organised political and economic movement ...”

“... out propaganda work among the peasantry. As time went by, many of them turned their attention to urban workers; some became key figures in early Russian Marxism. And then there were the radicals – among them, Narodnaia Volia. The radicals held to the Bakuninite notion that beneath the placid surface of the Russian masses lay the elemental fury of ...”

“... But they will have nothing to do with Gyuri, apart from selling him food. Coming from an urban, assimilated Jewish family, speaking no Yiddish and scarcely able to follow Hebrew prayers, he is spurned by them as a shaygets – a gentile kid. Back in Budapest, Gyuri and his friends used to argue about what it meant to be a Jew, now that ‘race’ had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”