“... 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 ...”

“... based on the deal that I had signed with Andrew under duress … The head of the record company [Mark Dean of Innervision] turns up with these contracts and we go to this greasy spoon café and he says: ‘Look, if you don’t sign this now, the deal is going away, you won’t have finished demos to take away with you, you won’t own them.’ We were on our ...”

“... a set of dank studios; he offered one of the four chambers of this pharaonic tomb to an eccentric urban wanderer and dog fancier, who brought back each day’s plunder from his scavenging expeditions across the surface of things, and heaped them into a space that very soon became a single compacted block, an uncelebrated curation in the spirit of Joseph ...”

“... Millerite sect showed in the 1840s: when their predictions of the world’s end kept missing the mark, they just kept rescheduling.The capture of US public discourse by a narrow millenarian sect deserves some explanation – especially since the sect’s commitment to forever war is sharply at odds with American public opinion and sectarian-backed imperial ...”

“... films – seven of them, by my count, anybody else’s masterpiece – and created, with Mark Frost, the show that ‘changed TV for ever’, Twin Peaks. At least to begin with, he took anyone who met him by surprise. Mel Brooks, who produced his second film, The Elephant Man (1980), ‘expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat ...”

“... they say, ‘like a man’: that is, she betrays none of the collusive charm which is supposedly a mark of the feminine genius. As a result, because she writes as a woman, not like a woman, Randall Jarrell could say of The Man Who Loved Children (1940): ‘a male reader worries: “Ought I to be a man?” ’ Jarrell thought that The Man Who Loved Children was ...”

“... resembles other versions, which resembles Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, in appearing to embody an urban view of country life. The rural Burns does much to authenticate the view with a bitterness and candour from which his beggars are not exempt, and to persuade the reader that the poem is valid, and was valid for Burns, as an attack on an oppressive and ...”

“... Its catastrophically small share of the world aviation market gave it scarcity value. The mark of its failure could become the badge of its exclusivity. Concorde’s glamour, he saw, could be used to differentiate BA in the crowded market for transatlantic flights. It could be made into a unique selling point for the whole airline – BA-commissioned ...”

“... End of London, will materially help the development and refurbishment of the river as a principal urban resource. There have already been signs of new industries, and new forms of industry, converging upon its banks. In particular the high-technology electronics companies have arrived in the Thames Valley, and there are many industrial ‘parks’ placed ...”

“... traces the holy sign of the dollar over the desolate earth. The conclusion to the novel does not mark the end of the book, however. It is followed, first, by Rand’s own About the Author sketch. ‘My personal life,’ she says, ‘is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: “And I mean it.”’ She concedes that she was born in ...”

“... of destruction in the 1990s was followed by consolidation in the 2000s; the model’s high-water mark came in 2008, when Putin’s smooth handover to Medvedev demonstrated the president’s complete control over the political system. But the achievement of stability brings its own dangers: the longer the regime stays in power, the less plausible its ...”

“... them, destroyed them totally. The second speaker replies in accents of cold definiteness that mark exactly the narrow range and stoic impartiality of Cavafy’s style: You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same ...”