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“... of the British Mandate in Palestine in 1922, and of the defeat of the Ottomans before the gates of Vienna in 1683. In On the Natural History of Destruction W.G. Sebald asked himself whether among the reasons for the silence surrounding the bombing of German cities was a sense among postwar Germans that criminals and victims could not be properly ...”

“... producing what it’s best at producing, and exporting that abroad. The writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo are so influential in the trade world that most experts refuse even to discuss the merits of this basic laissez-faire assumption. The US, born out of a tax revolt in the same year that The Wealth of Nations was published, has long accepted it, and ...”

“... a penis. They were to be seen all over the city, on street-corners, at cross-roads, by doors and gates, and midway on roads from the country into town, providing points of reference in a city with few street-names and little interest in town-planning. On the eve of ventures or on receipt of gains, Hermes attracted ‘pleases’ and ‘thank-yous’ in the ...”

“... coaches and managers of the major world soccer teams, and all manner of celebrities, ranging from David Beckham to Charlize Theron. There has been much speculation about whether Diego Maradona will attend the draw. He has been banned from doing so after a recent foul-mouthed TV performance, judged to have brought the game into disrepute, but he is apparently ...”

“... The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the ...”

“... the figures are shown performing routine daily tasks – driving wagons, fishing, opening lock gates – enhances the sense of order and well-being, the intimation that things have long been going on like this and it would be as well that they continue to do so. It is the Suffolk in which Constable grew up as the son of a miller who prospered enough to ...”

“... back on an identity beyond politics: the spirit of the Protestant apprentice boys who had shut the gates of Derry in the face of King James. This retrenchment had the effect of removing from Protestant identity the level of political allegiance and negotiation. Any reform was, and still is, construed as an immediate threat to fundamental values. Addressing an ...”

“... killing at a nearby liquor shop before leading his French pursuers into an ambush outside the city gates. Fraser also tells the extraordinary story of the friar Luis Gutiérrez, a would-be philosophe who fled to France a step ahead of the Inquisition in 1789 and set himself up as a revolutionary propagandist and anti-clerical novelist. In 1808 he turned French ...”

“... midst of their new-built homes.’ When an execution took place, crowds would gather outside the gates, as if the spectacle of the building itself substituted for the unseen scaffold within. Ken Neale, who helped oversee the partial demolition and rebuilding of Holloway in the 1970s, described the original building as ‘a devilish ...”

“... of Islamic radicals in the banlieues and second that once you let religion back through the school gates – from which it was gloriously expelled in 1905 – you undermine your duty to provide a serious education, free of cant and superstition. Teachers tell worrying stories which depict the veil as the beginning of selective opposition to the ...”

“... is doing it with Iran, where US policy remains in suspension: between the preference of Robert Gates and Admiral Mullen for a strategy of containment, by which Iran would give up nuclear-weapons research in return for a guarantee of regional security; and the counter-pressure from Dennis Ross, the antenna and prod of the Israel lobby within the White ...”

“... words were generated by the celebrated youngish American novelist, journalist and story-writer David Foster Wallace. Although willing to tilt at shiny targets of grammatical contention (the ending of sentences with prepositions etc), Wallace was, for the most part, hunting bigger game: America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters ...”

“... his 1981 painting The Irony of the Negro Policeman; in a recent interview in the Marshall Project, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, noted that black police officers in Baltimore are sometimes more brutal than white officers, as if their skin colour makes them immune to racism against poor blacks. A vivid indication of how far – or how low – we’ve ...”

“... recent Clear (2004), a short but bounding novel in which characters theorise about the illusionist David Blaine, are set in London, but Barker’s territory is the hinterlands of the South-East, where literature doesn’t tend to happen – Luton, Canvey Island, the Isle of Sheppey, Ashford (‘gateway to Europe’). Despite the prizes – the Booker ...”

“... warfare. Until relatively recently, cities didn’t just have borders; they had walls and gates and guards to keep watch on who came in and who went out. Cities controlled commerce and regulated the money supply. To claim that cities have always done politics differently – shown how to make it more intimate, more liveable – is a little ...”