“... has called ‘exposition’. ‘Exposition’ here refers to a physical and social world: the new urban landscape of grands boulevards, great exhibitions, department stores, along with the hinterland of empire from which so many of its commodified exhibits came. It is the universe massively investigated by Walter Benjamin as the origin of what was later to be ...”

“... in a matter of weeks, and reconstruction provided work at good wages to a large segment of the urban population. When working men had spending money, street trades like prostitution and fast food profited too. Although Japan’s disaster-prone capital lies on a major faultline and tremors are frequent, fire was by far the more common source of destruction ...”

“... political conditions, though the Greens still suffer under first past the post in progressive urban centres such as Lambeth, where their voters are under-represented. Had a right-wing populist party achieved something similar – sitting Ukip councillors were effectively obliterated in this election – the British press would have discovered in the ...”

“... rather than fully conceived towns, many of these ‘grands ensembles’ had little by way of an urban centre, leaving their inhabitants dependent on Paris for nearly everything. ‘I’ve lived in the “ville nouvelle” for twelve years and I don’t know what it looks like,’ Annie Ernaux writes in Journal de dehors of Cergy-Pontoise. ‘I can’t ...”

“... alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house, of course. You could get into the vicarage garden via a side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The ...”

“... Jacques’s version is only a little less absurd than Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard, a fellow seer of the Demos think tank Jacques helped to found. But there is another side to When China Rules the World at odds with its generally upbeat story. Internationally, China has ‘embraced multilateralism’, attracts its neighbours and ...”

“... shows of Georgian London included transparencies painted on canvas and backlit with oil lamps to mark notable public occasions. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 saw a display outside the French ambassador’s residence where the figures of France and England stood united between the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Concord’. Unfortunately, some sailors in the crowd ...”

“... the personal touch by way of printing techniques is one way of suggesting the anonymity of modern urban life, of getting that gritty feeling into the paintings. Around 1995, however, a new element appeared in Wool’s work that seemed to reel back on the doctrine of impersonality: spray-gun painted loops whirled onto the painting surface. They could be seen ...”

“... film La Haine, regarded as a classic in many circles, is currently being shown in UK cinemas to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its release. ‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the word rather ...”

“... illegitimate daughter of Bernarbò Visconti; to the title of gonfalonier of the Church, for Urban VI; and to the office of captain general for the proud republic of Florence, whose grateful citizens honoured him with a state funeral. The story that Stonor Saunders traces is a truly remarkable one. John Hawkwood was born the younger son of Gilbert ...”

“... either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on London. Well, not ...”

“... 18th-century houses in Kensington Square. The market gardens and nurseries which surrounded this urban housing disappeared rather slowly, as land to the south of Kensington High Street was developed. The modest scale of the brick houses of Kensington Square, the neat brick and stucco of Edwardes Square (1811-25) and the Italian-villa-like elevations of ...”

“... has the NKVD co-ordinators of mass murder holding a public celebration in the Bolshoi Theatre to mark the twentieth anniversary of their organisation in December 1937. The grotesquerie is unavoidable. Schlögel’s task is to describe one of the most notoriously violent peacetime societies in modern history at its most notoriously violent moment. The period ...”

“... of citizens. The polis walls serve an obvious defensive and protective purpose, but they also mark the frontier between citizens and enemies, the threshold between politics and the wild. Criminals had made themselves enemies of the state, so the Athenians cast their remains out of the city after execution, just as Londoners took the corpses of provincials ...”

“... Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think that they have all the things they have because they deserve them. As for the Downers, it’s hard ...”