“... 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 ...”

“... as an outsider intellectual. He emerged from the mid-2000s network of bloggers that also included Mark Fisher, Nina Power and Owen Hatherley.* Their interests differed, but they shared a commitment to challenging what they saw as the stultifying political and cultural consensus of the neoliberal boom years – what Fisher called the era of ‘capitalist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... uncovered a pattern of casual and widespread corruption among officers of all ranks. Sir Robert Mark, the Metropolitan Commissioner at the time, was determined to root out the ‘bad apples’. In February 1976 Mark announced that 82 officers had been dismissed following formal proceedings; a further 301 had left ...”

“... therefore, be denied them; a belief that the removal of strangers whose appearance and manner mark them out as different would cause no new problems and make the natives happier.‘I think it’s the boats, this thing of the boats, it’s critical,’ Deirdre told me. ‘People are tired of nobody doing anything about all these people coming in in boats ...”

“... when a heron mobbed by crows near Primrose Hill missed him by inches, but as with any evidence of urban rurality, I find it cheering. It confirms, too, my detestation of gulls, which I would happily see hounded out of cities and back to their proper stamping ground. 28 July. I’m just finishing the Collected Stories of John Cheever, all 892 pages of it. Full ...”

“... New York in realistic terms: like Kafka’s America, it’s a phantom city – a figure of urban apocalypse. The noir elements that were so haunting in his earlier novels now incline to farce, amusing enough but in the end wearying. The writer who had parodied older forms – Greek tragedy, noir, the novel of matrimonial betrayal – now seemed to be ...”

“... him in the success with which he explored the problem. If Nature is not easy to define in modern urban society, neither is that quality by which the novelist pursues his search: his intelligence. Sharp difference of opinion concerning James’s intelligence (its kind rather than its quantity) is as much a feature of criticism of him as is the difficulty of ...”

“... the Castro) and the dykes and queers turn out to be pretty patriotic. (We’re all proud of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped crash Flight 93 into the ground.) Every few hours I talk to my lover Blakey in Chicago. She lives in a big high-rise off Lake Shore Drive – we don’t know when we’ll see each other again. At ...”

“... large commodity and construction firms, this direct expansion of public banking was anathema to an urban middle class in an increasingly violent anti-PT mood, with the local media – amplified by the business press in London and New York – vituperating the dangers of statism. So, switching direction, Mantega sought to boost private sector investment by tax ...”

“... rage’, his ‘calm, generous and open’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was 38; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of ...”

“... or where any such additions may have been put in. Parker has convinced himself that the sure mark of any added material is that some direct reference is made in it to Pierre as a working poet or novelist. And since, again in his view, all references of this kind only begin to occur about two thirds of the way into the novel, in Book XVII (‘Young ...”

“... date, and if there are not yet sheep and goats in the high-rise apartments, the dependable urban-village ways of Pristina neighbourhoods have been thrown out of kilter by the influx of real villagers from real villages. This new sociology hints at an older political tension between the KLA, conceived abroad but nurtured in rural Kosovo, and the ...”

“... inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys – all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don’t find them in Penrith. 16 March, Yorkshire. As age weakens the bladder I find myself having to pee more often, which, when I’m out in the country in ...”