“... out by ‘Bedouin’ – that is, country bumpkins. For Gaddafi & Co, the traditions of the urban elites offered no recipe for governing Libya: they would only perpetuate its disunity. The Mediterranean and the Middle East are not short of examples of lands made painfully into states based, not on the cosmopolitan societies of the seaboards, but on the ...”

“... their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner lounging. In addition to the difficulties of childhood history, these three authors have had to confront the difficulty involved in writing collaborative ‘official’ history for a diverse ...”

“... he become a senior inspector with commensurate pay. Throughout his life he was vile to poor Arthur Hugh Clough, from whom he had absorbed fresh ideas about the writing of poetry – dismal Clough, as famous for being a Victorian failure and misfit as for being a minor poet. He was quite impossible to his petite, lovely, intelligent, acute-minded and sensible ...”

“... the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the financial and Naval machinery ...”

“... Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every day, urban-pastoral reservations hidden behind high walls win prizes for visionary planting schemes and restored municipal beds. Unnoticed, rough sleepers in thin bags utilise the stone terrace of the park café that has been shut for years. Late risers, having ...”

“... On the eastern side of the road there appeared the largest, poorest, dirtiest area of peri-urban habitation ... it went on for miles. There were some handkerchief-sized houses with asbestos roofs; a few bare brick schools with iron roofs; one-room shops barred like little forts. The rest was litter. There was the litter people lived in; there was the ...”

“... saw the demonstration as evidence of the intellectual and emotional sterility induced in the urban Irish by sexual abstinence – something he himself knew a lot about, though apparently not suffering the same effects. As time went by he talked more and more about his distaste for the Dublin populace, which broke up Synge’s play, kept shops or worked ...”

“... most influential families, including the (Lord John) Russells and the Trevelyans; her father, Sir Hugh Bell, was also a Liberal MP. She took a brilliant First in history after only five terms at Oxford, despite enjoying an active social life. Her interest in the East began at 25, when she spent six months at the Embassy in Tehran with her uncle, Sir Frank ...”

“... the industrial lobby and those who proclaimed the increasing danger to public health and to normal urban life. Especially in the Victorian and Edwardian years, politicians took every kind of evasive action to avoid the thought that domestic coal fires – the sacred family hearth itself – rather than factory chimneys might be the critical source of London ...”

“... Italy, nominally in Papal service, including the famous ‘White Company’ of Sir John Hawkwood. Urban V attempted, unsuccessfully, to siphon off another large group under the Archpriest, to serve in the East against the Turks. Much more successfully, late in 1365, the Pope and the King of France (now Charles V) financed Bertrand du Guesclin, veteran of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... architectural publications that the dream projects of the American architectural draughtsman Hugh Ferriss in his visionary book The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) did in fact directly influence Stalin’s Moscow skyscrapers, which Koolhaas guessed purely by looking at pictures. Fans of apocalyptic mid-20th-century culture will be delighted that Cohen has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the book’s warm reception was almost unanimous. One noisily dissenting voice was that of Hugh Kenner and part of his objection was similar to Empson’s. ‘What he asserts is so,’ Kenner says of Ellmann’s book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out ...”

“... inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys – all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don’t find them in Penrith. 16 March, Yorkshire. As age weakens the bladder I find myself having to pee more often, which, when I’m out in the country in ...”