“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... regional assemblies, and the third team have been recruited as placemen: management of the great urban areas, which will make or break the reform programme, is being handed over to the fourth team. In some sense this is a fine thing: we will have democracy at every level and large numbers of blacks will acquire jobs previously confined to a narrow Afrikaner ...”

“... he is allegedly explaining modern art. At the other end of the scale, realist works range from Mark Wallinger’s hyper-realist racehorse pictures and Richard Patterson’s monumental painting of a tiny plastic model of a minotaur through to the ‘bad’ and faux-naif portraiture of Martin Maloney and James Rielly. Other painters adapt traditional Realist ...”

“... this post at Court, urged on by her father. Whenever the Queen’s bell rang (‘so mortifying a mark of servitude’) she had to hurry to attend to her. Worst of all, she was left ‘unremittingly’ in the company of Mrs Schwellenberg, the Queen’s favourite courtier and the ‘Cerbera’ guarding the regal gate. Davenport catches the sheer ...”

“... responsibility, was soon identified as an unsightly nuisance, a blip on the unblemished myth of urban regeneration. The Owl Man was old and wild. He was raw nature against the pasteurised alternative, that eco-milkshake of green politics, donkeys in city farms, traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s sensational Wagnerian lightshow. Before ...”