“... and means good. ‘We would rather have “Fra Lippo Lippi” than an essay on Realism in Art,’ George Eliot said in her warm and insightful review of Men and Women, the collection in which the poem was published, without question Browning’s masterpiece. She singled out for similar admiration a passage from another poem in the book, ‘How It Strikes a ...”

“... which precipitated perhaps the most dangerous financial crisis in the history of the republic (as George W. Bush said of his country’s economy at the time, ‘This sucker could go down’). The memoirs of Bush’s secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, make clear his utter terror at what the forthcoming election might do to his rescue plans if either ...”

“... Mariana, we have a startled sense of lost worlds. Shakespeare locates his comedy in the great urban capital of Vienna, and gives it three centres of action, one hearsay (the brothel) and two actual (the convent, the prison) – the first two, the convent and the brothel, always modulating into the third, the prison. The novice Isabella demands ‘a more ...”

“... insoluble problem: for example, we know a great deal about North Korean prison camps; indeed, George W. Bush welcomed a survivor, Kang Chol-hwan, who published a book about his experience (The Aquariums of Pyongyang, 2003), to the Oval Office last summer, and it is clear that even minor infractions of the rules of the North Korean dictatorship can get you ...”

“... of that Surrey speciality, the gated High Class Suburb (as Nairn, no ironist, called them): St George’s Hill, Wentworth, Camilla Lacey and so on. They would come in time to be valued by persons greedy for plastic columns: white collar criminals, oligarchs’ security apes, footballers, light entertainers and seedy golf pros – the improbable successors ...”

“... and unjust. Another example of this shameful but persistent pattern makes arresting reading today. George H.W. Bush’s largesse towards Iraq outdid Ronald Reagan’s, even after Saddam Hussein’s murder of a hundred thousand Iraqi Kurds had been amply documented. The credits provided by Bush ‘freed up currency for Hussein to fortify and modernise his more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and the prizes have arrived in diplomatic procession: the Impac Dublin Literary ...”

“... In the historical situation of the American colonies, they were going to choose them whether George III and Lord North liked it or not. There was no point in arguing with that political fact: ‘I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.’ Burke’s opposition to the American war has a further dimension which comes ...”

“... of nationalists, who voted out, and business interests, who voted in; Labour is a coalition of urban liberals, who voted in, and the working class, who voted out. This means that if a general election were held tomorrow on the single issue of the referendum, the voter wouldn’t know whom to vote for. It wouldn’t be at all clear which faction in either ...”

“... struggle – with a lot of criminal activity under the rubric – by implying that the masses in urban South Africa were led astray by clever cosmopolitans with a scheming, internationalist agenda. During the 1950s and 1960s, race reactionaries in the US denounced white activism in the Civil Rights movement on similar grounds. Johnson didn’t like the way ...”

“... of a previous age, transferred into night-lit industrial landscapes. A pastoral rendition of the urban, or an urbanisation of the pastoral. Snug journeys in automobile and train, the passing scenery lit by the dying rays of modernist romanticism, as per Baudelaire’s ‘dandyism’: a setting sun, singularly striking, but lacking heat or warmth and ‘full ...”

“... cancelled at the last minute. Oral biography is more familiar in the US than it is in Britain: George Plimpton and Studs Terkel were two of its best-known exponents. In these books, the life of, say, Truman Capote, is told through the words of those who knew him: the author is editor and orchestrator. Lockhart’s Life of Scott is similar: much of the book ...”

“... and another of the league’s main organisers, who thought the US government had fumbled the urban counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers and other radical groups, and that lessons should be learned from the admirable ruthlessness with which Latin American and East Asian authoritarians had crushed their leftist opponents. In its early years the ...”

“... proportion of white male Republican voters typically reaches landslide proportions, as it did for George W. Bush. Before Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone to the White House. Losing its ...”