“... 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 ...”

“... with Republicans dominant in the conservative heartland but enjoying less appeal on the urban coastline. On closer inspection, the Republicans lose none of their menace, but they also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who ...”

“... had to be appeased; so did the squires who staffed the peace commissions in the counties, and the urban elites who governed cities and provided soldiers and ships; so did the village tax collectors, tasked with the unenviable job of getting everyone else to hand over their money.During Richard II’s reign, major political crises were almost always caused by ...”

“... taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered everything from a flea circus to a waxworks display under one roof. Books had their place along with vaudeville, Abolitionist songs and the Fiji mermaid. In ...”

“... Mariana, we have a startled sense of lost worlds. Shakespeare locates his comedy in the great urban capital of Vienna, and gives it three centres of action, one hearsay (the brothel) and two actual (the convent, the prison) – the first two, the convent and the brothel, always modulating into the third, the prison. The novice Isabella demands ‘a more ...”

“... his own bullet-points into company with their resounding dénouement, a bullet that clipped its mark. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op. ‘Let me get my ...”

“... and Atlas’s but also Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound), critical studies (Mark Shechner’s zesty Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth) and the fictionalised portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa ...”

“... it could be anything from a subversive political prank to a ‘psychogeographic’ drift through urban space. Some of the counter-cultural practices associated with the 1960s – the happening, the Be-In, the arts lab, the free festival – might qualify, at least before they became codified and commercialised; an inner-city riot or a wild-cat strike ...”

“... cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies; but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career. He had just left the Tommy Dorsey band, had a slick new press agent called Milton Rubin, and the beginnings of what we would now call a posse. It was a personal turning point for the young man ...”

“... still unaccustomed role of global superpower show a strong family resemblance. ‘History,’ as Mark Twain noted, ‘doesn’t often repeat itself; but it rhymes.’ I first saw Vietnam in November 1966, on assignment from the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. I arrived in Saigon with a letter from my editor I could easily have written myself, and a hazy idea of ...”

“... War, race relations, the New Deal and the Cold War. The intersection of two elements seems to mark a new area of peculiarly intense interest: in the early colonial period, much of North America was an immediate part of the British world (and some of its most important records are available therefore only in British archives); and Early Modern migration ...”

“... with journeying, the kind of internal ‘itinerary’ which (in Mandelstam’s image) is the mark of achieved poetry. Like Clampitt, he draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature ...”

“... the British to take over large portions of the old Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Sir Mark Sykes (co-signatory of the Anglo-French agreement that led to the establishment of mandates in Palestine, Syria and Iraq) fully shared, and was no doubt thoroughly influenced by, Blunt’s contempt for the Levantine ‘Gosmoboleet’. Lawrence, the young ...”