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“... example, Joseph Addison would write a drama in praise of Cato; why this drama would be admired by George Washington and imitated by Eustace Budgell; and why the latter’s 1737 suicide note would read: ‘What Cato did, and Addison approv’d,/Cannot be wrong.’ These deaths were meant to resonate. While the immediate reality of the final moments is beyond ...”

“... cosmic of questions. From Matthew Arnold’s portentous idiom of sweetness and light to George Steiner’s reverent talk of artefacts as real presences, art is a domain of displaced transcendence. It is the one remaining intimation of immortality for those who mourn the spiritual barbarisms of modernity, but are modern enough themselves to feel ...”

“... articulated. But the novel doles out enough information early on about Smith’s background as an urban adventurer to prevent him from moving with the stiffness of someone concealing large surprises up his sleeve. Any loss of flow and naturalness gets recouped in compound ironies, especially when it comes to Oakeshott’s production of Cato, a creaky verse ...”

“... old and the young, the educated and the less educated, the metropolitan and the provincial, the urban and the rural. The two main parties increasingly resemble loose coalitions of different interest and identity groups, each with its own axe to grind, and primarily united by their dislike and distrust of the people on the other side. Our two-party system is ...”

“... from British India. Some also campaigned against economic exploitation. ‘If we are honest,’ George Orwell wrote, ‘it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.’ Firms in London and Glasgow grew fat on profits from the export of Burmese rice, oil and timber while ordinary villagers sank into poverty. In 1937 Burma was ...”

“... than nature or the human body, led to a state of exhaustion and burnout which the US neurologist George Miller Beard diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia’. Beard defined the condition as a depletion of nervous energy and explained it by analogy to an electrical current: when a circuit is overloaded with light bulbs, it eventually reaches a point where ‘the ...”

“... Ronald Reagan had to suffer exposure in the Iran-Contra affair, complete with a televised apology. George Bush, the one recent President who avoided any serious investigation or humiliation while in office, was instead punished more harshly in the 1992 election – the voters found him too aloof, much too certain of his right to lead. Had he been humbled at ...”

“... their debts; consumption dips as workers’ income diminishes, and they fear not meeting theirs; urban economic centres, close-packed and fast-paced, serve as vast disease transmission centres. It isn’t so much a liquidity crisis as a solvency crisis on both sides. The pandemic, too, follows economic lines, as historic pandemics followed military ...”

“... had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 proclamation, George III made major concessions to Indian tribes and declared the Appalachian mountain range to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the ...”

“... to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly hats, sloppy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which he scrutinises the broken glass bedded in the cement top of the wall in the front of one urban landscape and the thirty or so chimneys on the skyline in the other. These are good illustrations of his determination to make the familiar look unfamiliar, more specific, more distinct in personality, as he puts it. Freud planned to put figures in both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of commending ‘class struggle’ on British lines as good for both progress and stability: what he really stood for, Addison makes clear, was ‘a ...”

“... siege of 1848 and the vote – implausibly unanimous – for unification. On the other hand, an urban historian would not be short of themes. There was, for instance, the attempt to modernise Venice, symbolised by the railway (which was nearly extended as far as S. Giorgio Maggiore) and by the conversion of the church of S. Girolamo in Cannareggio into a ...”