“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hadn’t won Iowa, the first state to vote, therefore it wasn’t worth much of an effort.) Mark Penn, the pollster who oversaw Bill’s 1996 re-election, was hired to run Hillary’s equally poll-driven campaign. (Penn’s specialty is dividing the electorate into minuscule special-interest groups and then devising messages for each one.) Much of ...”

“... guerrilla attacks compelled the colonial administration to cancel the celebrations scheduled to mark the queen’s birthday. Six months later, on 29 November 1967, with the closure of the Suez Canal depriving Aden of much of its value to the British, the British finally left, after 128 years. As Humphrey Trevelyan, the last high commissioner, waved a ...”

“... for death than for the thwarted lives that precede it. Elegies are invariably pastoral but his are urban; V. doesn’t come from a country churchyard but from a cemetery above a used-up pit. Elegies are supposed to be one-offs, like funeral addresses, but his are recurrent – Continuous is the title of one of his collections – and sometimes come in numbered ...”

“... of nostalgic (and commodified) snapshots of the French countryside as an antidote to France’s urban and industrial ills. In 1849 Bonheur was awarded 3000 francs from the Ministry of the Interior for a grand composition of animals grazing. For its setting she chose the Nivernais, another relatively untouched corner of France, though one recently troubled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a polemical disaster. Perhaps that’s why Gollancz had it illustrated with painful photographs of urban poverty in Wales, Newcastle, Coatbridge, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Stepney, Poplar, St Pancras and Durham (there’s not a single photograph of Wigan): to counteract Orwell’s odd views. Before The Road to Wigan Pier was published, Orwell was in Spain, on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... material gives the reader a welcome breather – a leafy break – from the bat-winged frenzy of urban gothic The Black Veil otherwise purveys. Group therapy temporarily bumps Moody’s self-absorbed psyche out of the spotlight and allows him to redirect his gaze outwards, gain a modest perspective (since most of the other patients are worse off than he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... created in Kuwait. Indeed, think of our loyal friend Mubarak in Egypt, which has a much larger urban population than Iraq. Everyone said Afghanistan was a graveyard for foreigners – British, Russian and so on – but we liberated it quickly enough, and now the UN is doing excellent work bringing it back to life. Why not Iraq? If all goes well, we could ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that of the Army, which commonly rates second after the Church. The surveys are predominantly urban, but so is the population. The guerrillas currently achieve an approval rate of around 3 per cent. To the evidence of the polls can be added the massive demonstrations against violence mounted by various citizens’ organisations in cities throughout the ...”

“... under the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, a sui generis thinker whose ideas left a lasting mark. Good political thought, for Ankersmit, was never of the sort personified by Rawls: an abstract system of principles detached from concrete reality. It was always a response to urgent historical problems, produced by thinkers – Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Burke ...”