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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abolish racialised slavery, and would get its comeuppance when the West was fully settled and the urban poor turned on the Northern master class. A handful of Southerners, like the eccentric social theorist George Fitzhugh, endorsed white slavery by the end of the 1850s for practical rather than religious reasons. Davis ...”

“... ladylike manners . . . Elizabeth’s heroines were all perfect beauties. Rubinstein’s women were urban, edgy, glamorous, while Arden’s classic beauties were more like women who had inherited great wealth and spent time on country estates and vacationed at the watering holes of the upper classes . . . Elizabeth remained convinced that her ‘ladies’ spent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... factory smoke – all those fetid conglomerations that seemed to merge with the violence of urban life – couldn’t be prevented from snuffing out the vulnerable. Dickens had brooded over it thirty years earlier but the London fog reached its peak in the 1880s. Health resorts and watering places, with their ‘curative’ sea air and salt ...”

“... 94 mph.As the decades pass and the council homes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s grow into the urban landscape, as their brick and concrete weathers, as they benefit from comparison with the mean little boxes being built by private housebuilders, as a mix of new management, new investment and funds from the last Labour government have dealt with some of ...”

“... idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz)’ who represented ‘urban malaise, second-generation complaint, Talmudic dazzle [and] woeful alienation’.Schwartz’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’ appeared in Partisan Review in January 1938. It opens with an image of a garden in St Petersburg, where the ...”

“... scholarship about Muslim contributions to Western science, most recently summarised in George Saliba’s Islam and the Making of the European Renaissance. He prefers the hoary prejudice that Muslim clerics began to shut down rational thought in their societies at the end of the 11th century. He brusquely dismisses Kenneth Pomeranz’s path-breaking ...”

“... my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it ...”