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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... and Budapest. Vienna itself quintupled its population during this period, reaching the two million mark by 1914. It was a city of immigrants, as multinational as the empire over which it ruled. It was a melting-pot, but only up to a point. The biggest immigrant group, the Czechs, were absorbed fairly easily, partly by coercion, as Monika Glettler points out in ...”

“... and Pietermaritzburg, similar to the famous Hole in the Wall hideout in the old American West: urban gangsters keep their girlfriends here and outlaws come to lie low after a heist. Arthur told me he’d discovered that professional hit-men in the area charge between R200 and R1000 for an assassination. Two thirds of Arthur’s neighbours had suffered ...”

“... the hill – at all other times, they would unashamedly have dismounted well before the half-way mark. During this period it was impossible to enter a café, use public transport, or queue in a post office, without having to take part in the common culture of the Tour. There was Robic, the Breton, who was a difficult and hard man, Koblet, le pédaleur de ...”

“... poetry at all, they will want to fall back on theory and categorisation. Classical and romantic, urban and rural, paleface and redskin, Ego and Id ... In Britain it has been found convenient at varying levels – a telegraphese for journalism and academic use alike – to subsume the period under two poets, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Their contemporaries ...”