“... years he made some twenty documentaries, on Victor Hugo, Pascal, Louis Lumière, Edgar Allan Poe, urban architecture, the evolution of the French language and a weirdly captivating programme on cement. It helped that Rohmer was always curious: Big Ears was one of his nicknames, for the enjoyment he took in listening to people, whatever their ideas. He was ...”

“... in Salerno were granted €2.3 million of public money to build an orphanage in a depressed urban area, they built a luxury hotel instead. Found guilty of appropriating funds under false pretences in 2012, the archbishop of Salerno avoided punishment when the crime lapsed under the statute of limitations before his appeal could be heard. Others went to ...”

“... for death than for the thwarted lives that precede it. Elegies are invariably pastoral but his are urban; V. doesn’t come from a country churchyard but from a cemetery above a used-up pit. Elegies are supposed to be one-offs, like funeral addresses, but his are recurrent – Continuous is the title of one of his collections – and sometimes come in numbered ...”

“... under the pressure of following traffic. He missed the turn.’Gloria forfeits the richness of urban and suburban life as the illness inscribes itself in her body, from the early stages when the diagnosis is no more than a terrible prophecy somehow connected to the odd weakness in her fingers, to the time when she can no longer drive or walk and every ...”

“... people must be evil incarnate.’) His speech, part General Westmoreland, part urban guerrilla, was a sort of post-Vietnam gobble-the-gook. The SLA, he said, had declared war against the United States: a war of the poor and oppressed against fascism. She should consider herself in protective custody’ and would be treated according to the ...”

“... city have been projected into the sky; the lower depths of the Thirties have not gone from urban Britain. And we have a government which has yet to worry whether the people there die of Aids. At one stage Glasser is invited to look at a tenement close – by Bernard, a Communist who was to fight in Spain and to return with an altered mind. In Spain ...”

“... material gives the reader a welcome breather – a leafy break – from the bat-winged frenzy of urban gothic The Black Veil otherwise purveys. Group therapy temporarily bumps Moody’s self-absorbed psyche out of the spotlight and allows him to redirect his gaze outwards, gain a modest perspective (since most of the other patients are worse off than he ...”

“... internet freedom as akin to support for Soviet dissidents; a former national security adviser to George W. Bush floated awarding Twitter the Nobel Peace Prize.The cycle of protest that started in Britain in late 2010 was unusually contentious, and self-consciously part of this global wave. It included student demonstrations against rises in tuition ...”

“... one-piece swimsuit at the beach, looking as if he’s quietly enjoying himself – a more winsome George Costanza. These memes are surely made by people who had to study Adorno at university. They will probably have read the depressive aphorisms of Minima Moralia and some fragments from Dialectic of Enlightenment on the ‘culture industry’; a few ...”

“... called The Good Society, and he would define, through six decades of the 20th century, a liberal urban modernity, what that study called ‘the inwardness of the liberal conception of life … the logic of its principle and the grammar of its intuition’. Johnson, no doubt, would have said he had reality as well as principle to deal with as he pushed ...”

“... disguised accounts of the experiences of a devastated society. When the prominent environmentalist George Aditjondro of Java’s Satyawacana University spoke out openly in favour of East Timorese independence, and defied a government ban on his attendance at an international conference on East Timor in Portugal, the regime harassed him, but did not dare to ...”

“... For Thomson, in his essay ‘Who Killed the Movies?’ (the culprits were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas), ‘the death of film’ could be attributed to its ‘woeful removal from the cutting edge of our culture’.It was hard to miss the element not just of fogeyish intransigence but of generational warfare. Sontag talked about ‘the ...”

“... will get nothing. In the ranks of the Camden protesters are a transport planner, an architect, an urban-planning academic and various other professionals. They are hedging their bets: if they can’t stop the scheme, they hope they can at least mitigate the damage. In a spartan community centre under a grey tower block on Eversholt Street, just north of ...”

“... the basis of major reports by Royal Commissions – to regulate the chaos of early industrial and urban development. It imposed obligations on factory-owners to take safety measures for their workers and on property-owners to keep buildings in a sound state, and it set up powerful boards and commissions to oversee and regulate the profusion of ...”

“... In the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the ...”