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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ended, when HBO launched Lena Dunham’s Girls ...”

“... as concomitant with but not inevitably subservient to that of the young United States: 1776 might mark the founding of the US, but he claims it also marked the declaration of independence of another ‘empire’ two thousand miles away – the Lakota Sioux. A former farming people from the Missouri River valley, the Lakota had started a series of explorations ...”

“... moving from central Birmingham to Bournville, and Joseph Rowntree, which shifted production from urban York to suburban Haxby Road. Once the Cadburys took charge of Fry’s, they enforced change, and in 1920 a site of nearly 300 acres was bought in a meander of the River Avon, a few miles east of Bristol, outside the little town of Keynsham. In 1923, the ...”

“... This had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was ...”

“... had been one in 1933 and another in 1951) had been explicit about the danger gambling posed to the urban working classes, who were believed to be both more susceptible to its lure and more likely to suffer from its consequences. The Rothschild Commission went out of its way to note that a bit of light gambling might actually be good for the morale of people ...”

“... short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were ...”

“... activity. Eyes down watching the blade and glancing behind to check on the quality of the mark you have made, seeing it not quite correct, not bulbous enough, or unevenly rounded, finding the tail too elongated, not sharply enough defined, and beginning again to make it better, eventually to make it right. It’s that I imagine myself doing now.My ...”