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“... timelessness that makes them oddly available to the poet. In another monologue here, Thwaite makes George Dennis, Consul at Benghazi and a passionate antiquarian, open with words that form a splendidly resonant though decorous conceit for the poetic process itself: Rich bronzes, figured vases, jewellery – Fruits of my labours, subterranean joys: My men sit ...”

“... examine the views of three politically active individuals known to Coleridge in the mid-1790s, George Dyer, Southey and Lamb. Next, for no particular reason, comes the prison diary of an activist arrested in 1794 but not brought to trial, John Augustus Bonney. The second half of the book, which is concerned with some of the Lyrical Ballads, has little ...”

“... crisp blue skies crisscrossed with lines of puffy white; doctored gatherings of Barack Obama with George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jacob Rothschild, one of their arms stuck out at an unnatural angle to point a gun at the viewer; frowning women next to cell phones emitting harmful energies; the blurry Twin Towers in the moments before and after they were ...”

“... on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers in hope of hearing the first cuckoo of ...”

“... by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion’. Parry does not mention Urquhart’s particular enthusiasm for the Turkish ...”

“... is the usual end point. Thomas Pynchon once described Barthelme’s melancholy as ‘specifically urban’, but it’s also the mood of a particular time and class. His protagonists fret about la vie quotidienne (they use the French) – ‘What made us think that we could escape things like bankruptcy, alcoholism, being disappointed, having ...”

“... bland smiling bullfighters. But there is one American painter whose absence is to be regretted. George Bellows gave to the handling of Manet and Sargent a novel slap and punch which suited the violence and velocity of New York. We forget, among all the high society in this last room, that the Spanish Old Masters had also been drawn to rags and ...”

“... its roots. It has inherited power rather than fought for it … and mimicked the ways of the urban upper class.’ The same was true of the quasi-monarchical families and their associates operating in parallel fashion in Egypt, Libya and Iraq. Confident of their police-state powers, they ignored the hardships of the rest of the population, especially the ...”

“... In addition to its net gain of one seat from the Tories, it won 12 from the Lib Dems and unseated George Galloway in Bradford. A net gain outside Scotland of 14 seats is disappointing but not catastrophic. Labour did well in London, as expected, winning 45 of 73 seats and gaining four seats from the Conservatives and three from the Lib Dems. The social-ethnic ...”

“... Eric Ravilious – she turns her back on so much of his own generation. William Coldstream, whose urban-realist Euston Road School was surely a headline act in late 1930s England, remains strictly offstage. Coldstream’s friend Auden, still more obviously central to any account of the period, only steps out from the wings to introduce an Oxford Book of Light ...”

“... evacuation from Galicia. The ghastly French sieges of Saragossa ended with some of the worst urban combat seen in Europe before the 20th century, and as many as fifty thousand dead. After three more years of fighting, Bonapartist rule extended, in theory, over almost all of Spain. Yet guerrilla bands under chieftains with colourful nicknames like ‘The ...”

“... bookcase. The horse may be the most surprising case. Edgerton emphasises its continuing role in urban transportation and in warfare in the early to mid-20th century. Hitler’s army marched on Moscow with many more horses than Napoleon’s, and in 1945 the German army had 1.2 million of them, possibly an even higher ratio of horses to men than in previous ...”

“... and sister, the girl a good-hearted ingénue, the boy a worldlier character with an interest in urban planning, who have a complicated family history to unravel. Like the preceding novel, it’s written in a comic tone, with plenty of dark material, but this time satire is replaced by gentle irony. The heroine, Penny, is an unemployed recent graduate, the ...”

“... Federal Republic as the epitome of a comfortable German modernism, far less edgy than Otto Dix, George Grosz or Max Beckmann, let alone the wild men of the 1970s and 1980s such as Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer.It helped that Hitler’s personal distaste for Nolde’s work is well attested. His paintings featured prominently in the exhibition of degenerate ...”

“... intensifying ‘culture wars’ between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, and between rural and urban communities, Slotkin identifies the banking crisis of 2007-8, the Covid pandemic and changes in the racial and ethnic make-up of the American population. To these familiar culprits he adds a deeper problem: a lack of unifying ‘national myths’ that ...”