“... 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 ...”

“... within it. He hadn’t wanted to know.That curiosity has its costs is a thought entertained by George Eliot at a defining moment in Middlemarch. Some disappointments are so unexceptional, Eliot observes, that it would on the whole be better not to make too much of them. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and set the agenda for coalition with the Lib Dems. It became widely unpopular in 2012, when George Osborne made clear that high-income earners would endure less austerity than everyone else. The polarising effects of the cuts and the rise in university tuition fees then conveniently destroyed the Lib Dem brand and any threat it might have posed to the ...”

“... Barton suggests that Shakespeare does not show in his earlier plays the sympathy for the urban crowd that we find in Coriolanus. This is imprecise criticism. In fact Coriolanus is technically interesting for the manner in which it succeeds a. in telling us that the people are actually starving and b. in suppressing our natural pity (this, from the ...”

“... While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus eaters’ – should be starved to death.The Hungerplan, to give it its German proper name, began with the forcible starving of Soviet prisoners of war. Crowded into vast camps without ...”

“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... claim had come back to broadcasting, but certainly not to the coterie in the Stag’s Head and the George. Encouraged by the indulgent atmosphere around him, MacNeice from the beginning put the medium to an essentially private use. Those of his plays which purport to have a public theme – like Enter Caesar (1946) – in fact express deep suspicion of public ...”

“... records of the Irish Catholic poor in 1966: the churches that often stood in ‘half-deserted urban wastelands’ created by slum clearance; the ‘lumber-room of the town hall’ where he unearthed documents; the dinners he shared with a Wigan priest in a ‘tobacco-stained waistcoat’ and his Irish-born housekeeper. In the 19th century, Irish migrants ...”

“... peacekeepers now serve there. Senior Chinese leaders have been making two visits a year to Africa (George Bush has not visited the continent during his second term), and last November nearly every African leader attended a major summit in Beijing. China’s poor labour standards, environmental policies and human rights failings were once issues only for people ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”

“... the 1890s, with the novel Foma Gordeyev and a collection of his essays and stories which imported urban proletarian characters into Russian literature. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868 as Alexei Peshkov. His pen name meant bitter, signalling the way his life story was the guarantee of his work’s authenticity – this autodidact orphan who had ...”

“... nothing much, sitting in nondescript rooms, head in hands, smoking, sunk in a permanent Sunday of urban anomie, a bit like us. Hoods having moods, hoods displaying the unlikely evidence of an inner life: ‘dumb, melancholy, guilty, fearful, remorseful, reassuring one another’, in the words of a Guston studio note.The curatorial hand-wringing – over a ...”