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“... 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 ...”

“... of them) faring worse than social scientists even though more of them scored the highest mark. Everywhere, young academics are slicing off their heels and cutting off their toes to fit into the glass shoe. At the same time​ , with tuition fees now at £9000 per student per year, and more from graduates, money is gushing into the universities. If ...”

“... in a position to have informal intellectual contact with educated gentiles outside the only major urban Jewish population remaining in the West, the largely Sephardi community of Amsterdam. Most Jews, after all, were either confined to ghettos or prohibited from settling in large cities until well into the 19th century. As Jacob Katz observed in Out of the ...”

“... forms of the liberal world order’ proved disastrous, first economically then politically, as Mark Metzler recounts in Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan (2006). Japan had joined a global financial system run by Britain before the First World War in order to secure Western capital – and ...”

“... most unfortunate inheritance from the 19th century.’ Poor and rundown; Irish and Barbadian. Some urban planners were so convinced that destruction alone could improve the fabric of Notting Hill that they had the idea of turning Ladbroke Grove into the first few miles of a new motorway linking London to the North. Houses would be razed, trees cut ...”

“... of a previous age, transferred into night-lit industrial landscapes. A pastoral rendition of the urban, or an urbanisation of the pastoral. Snug journeys in automobile and train, the passing scenery lit by the dying rays of modernist romanticism, as per Baudelaire’s ‘dandyism’: a setting sun, singularly striking, but lacking heat or warmth and ‘full ...”