“... from the start. Staring them in the face. I. Penman. A modest assertion, registered anonymity. George Gissing reborn on the cusp of punk. Penman was gifted with a Grub Street membership card at a time when Grub Street had been decommissioned. The slender ego of that single initial protected the man from any possibility of worldly success. Puffed up with ...”

“... possibly therapeutic bed. Observers on each side – one suited, one nude (both Bacon’s lover George Dyer) – keep company with animalistic figures. Others were just-for-the-sake-of-it nudes, such as Gabrielle avec la chemise ouverte, one of Renoir’s ‘problem nudes’, which shows Gabrielle Renard, his wife’s cousin and the family nanny, with her ...”

“... would lack the strength, confidence and expertise to manage a turbulent, complex and increasingly urban society. In 1865 and again in 1880 most Liberals could not tolerate the idea of governing with the parliaments they’d inherited, which under Palmerston and then Disraeli had been comatose, plutocratic and complaisant in misgovernment. In all three ...”

“... tunnel, the least unreliable lift, was that the black hole at the epicentre of this vortex of urban restlessness was a necropolis to the age of cinema. The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child vagrant. Global-franchise tramp. Swiss ...”

“... knew where you stood. Over the same period, however, he has been better known for his work in urban theory – The Uses of Disorder (1970), The Fall of Public Man (1977), The Craftsman (2008) – which has developed an argument about the value and necessity of shared public space. The Uses of Disorder tackled the postwar flight of the better-off from the ...”

“... ammunition and explosives. The CIA also brought together the military and the police in sleek urban command centres, where intelligence could be quickly analysed, distributed, acted on and archived for later use. After these efforts achieved their most spectacular results, with the 1966 disappearance of Guatemala’s last generation of peaceful ...”

“... Jeremy Scahill. It was like out of a Dr No movie … It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city where you can train with real-life ammunition or paintball, with vehicles, with helicopters. Gosh, impressive, very impressive … I saw people from all over the world training there – civilians, military personnel … Wow, it ...”

“... issue was how to give depth to the coastal plain … The answer was to build a [network] of urban, industrial settlements.’ Likud had just won the election and as a result of Israel’s failure to predict the imminence of the 1973 war, the settlements were designated ‘good for security’, though the truth is that the army spent the first days of ...”

“... that played ‘Laugh, Clown, Laugh!’ Karabas was not a Jew, but fitted perfectly into that urban legend. ‘The more I spoke to Odessites of any nationality, the more convinced I became that he really was a heroic gangster who prevented social collapse and lawlessness.’ That remark shows one of the strengths of Glenny’s book. He is prepared to be ...”

“... contingency personified, who enters Henry Perowne’s life in Saturday through that most random of urban events, the car accident. Trauma, in McEwan’s work, inaugurates a loss of innocence. After the mother’s death, the childhood garden is cemented over, in his first novel, and the children, now orphaned, set about creating their own, corrupted version of ...”

“... Latin American Neo-Concrete artists such as Lygia Clark, or the placing of outsider ceramics by George Ohr, the ‘Mad Potter of Biloxi’, near prized paintings by Symbolists like Gauguin (I suppose on the basis of a shared ‘primitivism’). More suggestive still is the ambiguous pairing of Fiery Sunset (1973), a red and blue wonder by the African ...”

“... offered an escape from so much of what England had become, industrially advanced, aggressively urban, and full of mechanised agriculture. Already, by the 1890s, Thomas Cook was organising tours of Constable country. And during the Second World War, Willy Lot’s house and Flatford Mill were formally acknowledged as shrines by being presented to the ...”

“... moderate – while feeding off some of the same prejudices. Trump’s racist policies as an urban landlord and Giuliani’s racist pot-stirring as hizzoner were joined at the hip. Post mayoralty, Giuliani insistently blamed and upbraided Black citizens for being the engineers of their own besetting problems, claiming that police shootings were the ...”

“... Time In’) In his 1996 Everyman selection, George Walter calls this squaddie quality of absorption in the ordinary ‘his fascination with people – his democracy’. But it is not always present: it seems to come and go like a mind moving in and out of focus across all his postwar poetry-writing from ...”

“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”