“... 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 ...”

“... The Blitz had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... movement known as the Hyde Park Diggers was beginning to size up the countryside after a phase of urban squatting, and now imagined sanctuaries of rustic dissidence: free food, free love, free thinking, home-grown marijuana. Like Fourier’s phalansteries, they were going to nudge society organically towards a revolution that would take it beyond war, sexual ...”

“... Similarly, allegorical or other references to the end of time link writers and works as diverse as George Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), Henri Barbusse (Under Fire) and Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind). They all, Winter argues, ‘turned back to the ancient tradition of apocalyptic drama’. Even the English war poets, usually Exhibit A for Hynes and ...”

“... of the faculty were in favour of James Peacock, who had written a thesis on ludruk, the popular urban theatre of East Java, which he characteristically called Rites of Modernisation, and which was published with the same title. This Parsonian title did not help his cause with the students, for whom ‘modernisation’ was an abandoned fetish. They voted ...”

“... no knowledge of Argentina: he thinks it is an ‘agrarian feudalistic society’ with a ‘small urban middle class’. Dr Goebel, he speculates, was an anti-colonialist from the ‘vociferous’ Yale Law School, which gave him the ‘subconscious motive’ for writing on this subject. Perhaps, but the single-minded grind looks more like the eternal PhD ...”

“... nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for its warmth and for its acuity. Woolf admired Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is collected’ – as it ...”

“... of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the George-Bushian sense) have been losing ground in Iran. The Presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani were a slow-motion Thermidor. Since Muhammad Khatami was elected President in a landslide in 1997, Iran has stumbled towards accommodation, first with the Arab ...”

“... the vast power differential between central and local government: as chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne spent plenty of time talking about devolving new powers from Westminster in order to create a Northern Powerhouse, but his most effective act of power-sharing was to transfer the burden of responsibility for deficit reduction onto councils, which ...”

“... was rather far from the majority view of Castro’s 26 July Movement. When Guevara finally met the urban leaders of the movement, in the mountains in Cuba early in 1957, he was shocked by ‘the evident anti-Communist inclinations’ that prevailed among them. There was an angry exchange of letters at the end of that year between Guevara and René Ramos ...”

“... bedraggled little band constituted the first official English embassy to India. The flag of St George fluttered above their bivouac. The Ambassador was Sir Thomas Roe, a tough, intelligent, rather prickly man – a kind of blueprint for future administrators of British India. He had been in Mandu six months, grappling with exhaustion and acute ...”

“... woes is its reliance on passenger fares for 72 per cent of its funding, after a deal between George Osborne and Johnson, towards the end of his stint as mayor, slashed its central funding by £700 million. The equivalent networks in Paris and New York rely on fares for only 38 per cent of their funding. Crossrail’s delays and spiralling capital costs ...”

“... practised a theatrical as well as an artistic bohemianism, and was drawn to the grimier aspects of urban life, cultivated in the rooms he rented as studios in working-class areas of London. No picnics for him. ‘Dirty, tumbledown Camden town, Charlie Peace, pubs and cabbage’, was Hugh Walpole’s description of Sickert’s studio when he visited in the ...”