“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we want treating like that.’ The chairman of the South Yorkshire Police Committee, Councillor George Moores, then spoke. Youngsters ‘come into the force as decent chaps and we send them away to training centres and they come back like Nazi storm-troopers.’ After listening to over an hour of complaints against the Police, the Deputy Chief Constable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... up in anything less than jacket and tie. We took consolation in the calming panorama of Saint George Bay and talked ourselves into somnolence in preparation for the morning’s savagery. As a novice freelance among legendary correspondents from the world’s major newspapers, wire services and television networks, I knew my place: listen, observe and ...”

“... the impact of circumstances on men. Unlike the old, the ‘new’ history – economic, social, urban and demographic – explores people as categories, groups, statistics, abstractions, rather than as flesh-and-blood beings. ‘Mere’ biography is dismissed as attributing an unmerited significance to the trivial doings of trivial individuals. At best, it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years younger than himself whom he calls ‘Dick’ in Goodbye to All That – his real name was George Harcourt Johnstone. Graves always claimed their relationship was ‘chaste and sentimental’ and responded with fury when reprimanded for ogling Johnstone during chapel. In the trenches Johnstone’s weekly letters came to symbolise the ideal of pure ...”

“... V has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused. For George + Frances to go through life knowing their father had stood in the dock for attempted murder would be too much. When they are old enough to understand explain to them the dream of paranoia, and look after them. So Lucan is signing off. There was another ...”

“... 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 ...”