“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far enough. Napoleon’s mistake was that he employed freedom and equality as symbols to help his army win battles rather ...”

“... had ended. And the Census of 1851 shows you what: for the first time in British history the urban population was greater than the rural. Yet the cult of the landscape continues even now as if nothing had changed.In 1867 it became illegal to employ women and children in gangs providing cheap labour in the fields. This was a small social improvement at a ...”

“... believer in writing as a public, material art form, a proud member of the ‘inquiring rootless urban intelligentsia’ brought into being by the 1944 Education Act, would Carter have been pleased to find her papers in public ownership? Better that than pawed at by some oligarch collector, like the creepy Grand Duke in Nights at the Circus, but whether she ...”

“... Mythe, was the sole, irreplaceable source of supply for 350,000 people. For ten days, much of urban and rural Gloucestershire was pushed back in time by a couple of centuries. It was completely without running water. Pavey commandeered a food trolley from Marks and Spencer and set himself the task of pushing it around the sodden, cracked streets of ...”

“... announced its determination to expand Nato eastwards, despite warnings by seasoned observers from George Kennan to William Burns (now Biden’s director of the CIA) that to do so would aggravate Russian security concerns. The situation escalated in February 2014 with the Washington-backed coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the gradual takeover of the Maidan ...”

“... committed on both sides. In Britain, the debacle of his protégé brought the rule of Lloyd George to an end. Philhellene to the last, when he threatened to take the country to war over Turkish successes in October 1922, he was ousted by a revolt in the Carlton Club. The following summer Curzon, abandoning earlier Entente schemes for a partition of ...”

“... days. Reading Keats’s letters in the latter part of 1931, he encountered the journal-letters to George and Georgiana on the Western frontier of the United States. Eliot earmarked Keats’s strategies: ‘These are trifles – but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are ...”