“... of lives sunk in vice and degradation. These were the years when industrialisation created an urban culture that drew younger generations away from the land; and the more educated they became, the less they wanted the old way of life. The revolution of 1905, which led to the destruction of many estates by the marauding peasantry, eliminated any last ...”

“... was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the Agreement’s critics into his Administration, and they set about dismantling it, thus fulfilling their own prophecy and initiating another dangerous confrontation with Pyongyang. The same folks who brought us the invasion of ...”

“... Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell Pearce, embody the tensions in ...”

“... choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her ...”

“... to Synge to Christian neo-medievalism and the study of ancient Greece. The English scholar George Thomson reading Aeschylus on the Blasket Islands might seem an outlier in Irish Studies, but late Deane was as quick as young Deane to sense possibilities.The previously unpublished essay ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ argues that the distortions of legality ...”

“... to Harland & Wolff and its most famous ship and is itself the anchor of the Titanic Quarter, an urban regeneration project on the site of the shipyard. ‘We reckon it could be the biggest tourist attraction in Ireland,’ its director said in January 2009, ‘up there with the Guinness brewery in Dublin.’ But the natural history of lucrative popular ...”

“... his death. The desire to have this experience authenticate Dickens’s adult concern for the urban poor and explain his later depiction of any number of child waifs (one critic counted 318 orphans in Dickens’s fiction) tends to obscure the real nature of the young Dickens’s suffering as he later and very emotionally recalled it for his friend and ...”

“... London has more of in a quarter of an hour than Boston in nine months; he begs everyone, as he did George du Maurier, ‘Do tell me everything that has, or hasn’t happened’ – and ‘everything’ includes even those subjects that in theory James isn’t much interested in, like politics and scandal. One of the most memorable and characteristic brief ...”

“... End of London, will materially help the development and refurbishment of the river as a principal urban resource. There have already been signs of new industries, and new forms of industry, converging upon its banks. In particular the high-technology electronics companies have arrived in the Thames Valley, and there are many industrial ‘parks’ placed ...”

“... they say, can’t hold nativity plays or harvest festivals any more; you can’t fly a flag of St George any more; you can’t call Christmas Christmas any more; you won’t be promoted in the police force unless you’re from a minority; you can’t wear an England shirt on the bus; you won’t get social housing unless you’re an immigrant; you can’t ...”

“... an obvious source of profit – contributed to an oil glut through ‘distress sales’. (In 1986 George Bush Sr, then vice president, went to Riyadh to ask Saudi Arabia to lower its output, in order to increase prices and restimulate the oil-weapons trade.) Furthermore, the arms trade during the Reagan era remained subject to foreign policy constraints, as a ...”

“... polished steel of the gentleman’, an allusion, possibly, to another 16th-century writer, George Gascoigne, in whose satire ‘The Steele Glas’, the hero can see not only his own faults but those of kings, lords and knights. Pierre will similarly come to see the faults of his father mirrored in the little portrait he has cherished of him as a ...”

“... Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ended, when HBO launched Lena Dunham’s Girls ...”

“... invited by Tommy Robinson to speak at the Unite the Kingdom rally in London last September was George Simion, a far-right politician who had lost to the liberal candidate in the Romanian presidential election in May. The rally, an all-you-can-eat buffet of anger, conspiracies and victimhood, drew more than a hundred thousand people who broadly share the ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”