“... melt down one of his victims’ rings sufficiently thoroughly: it retained a distinctive soldering mark from an earlier repair. Upfield was called to give evidence at the trial.) Upfield clearly saw his decision to have his Sherlock Holmes figure be indigenous as a sign of his progressive views on race, but the meditations on race in the Bony books – the ...”

“... factory smoke – all those fetid conglomerations that seemed to merge with the violence of urban life – couldn’t be prevented from snuffing out the vulnerable. Dickens had brooded over it thirty years earlier but the London fog reached its peak in the 1880s. Health resorts and watering places, with their ‘curative’ sea air and salt ...”

“... was rather far from the majority view of Castro’s 26 July Movement. When Guevara finally met the urban leaders of the movement, in the mountains in Cuba early in 1957, he was shocked by ‘the evident anti-Communist inclinations’ that prevailed among them. There was an angry exchange of letters at the end of that year between Guevara and René Ramos ...”

“... blowing City Hall’s 2030 neutrality targets, and – toll or otherwise – it is an iron law of urban planning that roadbuilding increases car use. Neither Khan nor his transport chief, Heidi Alexander, have ever made a convincing ecological defence of the project.Khan’s 2021 manifesto reaches back to Labour’s 2017 programme, with its green ...”

“... putting the urethane of your wheels into a controlled slide. The skateboard is the most versatile urban conveyance. In a crowded city, no one on foot or bike or in a car can ever hope to keep up with you. Up and down stairs. On buses and trains in an instant. Holding onto the backs of delivery trucks. The city a body of water. Skaters like fish. One summer ...”

“... because here and there bands of young marginals were performing the rituals with which they always mark the anniversary: torching cars, putting up barricades and fighting with the police. During the official procession, hooded ‘anarchists’ threw a Molotov cocktail at the Moneda, flames leaping from a window in sinister reminder of what happened 33 years ...”

“... of new private homes built each year didn’t go up. It barely budged from the 150,000 a year mark. The market failed. There was increasing demand without increasing supply. Mid-boom, as the imbalance between the number of people chasing a house and the supply of new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling ...”

“... that it tends to force gay singles to live in the city. No hardship on those of us who love urban life, but painful for those who hate it.’ In Portland, White discovered ‘an unusual degree of integration with the straight community’ almost touching in its banality, distressing for the same reason: ‘A gay single or couple must deal with the ...”

“... caused the company to withdraw in 2010. Facebook has never been allowed into China, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s increasingly tragic attempts to suck up to the CCP: by prominently announcing that he was learning Mandarin, being photographed jogging in Beijing’s reeking, toxic smog, asking Xi Jinping to name his daughter (Xi declined) and – my ...”

“... machines’ and ‘well-scrubbed’ towns contrasted with China’s ‘squalid rural huts, urban slums, people and draft animals engaged in backbreaking labour’. North Korea seemed more prosperous, Martin thought, but China had more vitality. He went in 1979, but I had the same impressions on my first visit two years later: that North Korea had done ...”

“... where all kinds of contradictions have emerged – ‘not just young versus old, but rural versus urban, entrepreneurs versus proletariat’ – in the course of a jagged transition, making support for political campaign issues even more provisional than it usually is. If he is right, then what people really think about Kosovo is not clear. When politicians ...”

“... of their cramped houses into little shops, from which they hope to scrape a few dollars on modest mark-ups. During the Israeli assault this summer, Shatila received about eighty of the thousands of families who fled towards the capital, while the burial ground of 1982 now plays host to the victims of the recent war, with a large hoarding mourning civilians ...”

“... Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts. To mark​ the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too ...”

“... Number Ten. What’s more likely is that he understood this would be the project’s high-water mark. The 2017 election remains an awkward reminder for the right, and a totem for the left. Of the two elections held during Corbyn’s leadership it is the more interesting, because it demonstrates that Labour can win a significant section of the electorate ...”

“... more wrong. Had he qualified his assertion with ‘in fifty years’ he might have been nearer the mark. He was also mistaken when he wrote four years earlier of the ‘fading influence’ of Stockholm City Hall, the most scrutinised building of the period. Summerson’s predictions proved to be no more than wishfulness founded in the conviction that the true ...”