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“... front of the train station is a busy bus depot with a strange stepped metallic roof, resembling an urban ski jump whose builder suddenly lost his nerve. Opposite the transport hub is Vauxhall Bridge, sandwiched between two architectural monstrosities. On our right, Terry Farrell’s multi-coloured postmodern ziggurat houses the headquarters of MI6, and makes ...”

“... past tense to rabbit on about the pleasures of relaxation or play (the rural as the opposite of urban toil), of hearty good cheer (our fun is the only fun and everyone else is a killjoy), and of social – and racial – exclusiveness (gents not cads, saloon not public, the English or the British versus whoever the rest happens to be, at one time or ...”

“... picture. It had been one of London’s most marginal constituencies, the reddening of its western, urban end counterbalanced by Tory consolidation in its eastern reaches, where it resembles many of the towns in which Labour is diminishing. In May, the Tory candidate finished nine points ahead. It was a disorientating election. Incumbency was obviously an ...”

“... dirty smokey London’. He took tea with the Lyells (good science guaranteed no entrée here: George Busk was excluded on account of his wife’s rank). With characteristic diffidence Darwin saw himself as ‘only a sort of Jackall, a lions provider’: but lions like Sedgwick and Lyell were roaring approval at the Cambridge Philosophical and gentlemanly ...”

“... gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the ...”

“... The easy assurance of the Crown’s authority was threatened by exceptional population increases, urban and industrial expansion, widespread popular unrest, the extension of the franchise, the growth of an intrusive state, new ideas about democracy, political revolutions abroad, and even occasional mutterings in favour of republicanism at home. As wealth was ...”

“... though, storytellers are often not so tolerant of foolishness. One of the longest-surviving urban legends plays with a similar masked homecoming theme, using it to drive a story of violent crime and personal tragedy. Inverting the parable of the Prodigal Son, the legend – usually referred to as ‘The Tragic Mistake’ – supposes that, rather than ...”

“... himself steered almost totally clear of personal lampoons against politicians. It was the reign of George III that put political cartoons on the map. The print-makers of the 1760s had a field-day with a heroic John Wilkes (‘Wilkes and Liberty’) and with Lord Bute as Public Enemy Number One (no fewer than four hundred anti-Bute satires appeared, mainly ...”

“... governor of Michigan, was beaten in the 1968 primaries by Nixon and made secretary of housing and urban development, not a prized job in a Republican cabinet. Romney père’s mistake was to explain his switch from hawk to dove on Vietnam with the claim that he’d been ‘brainwashed’ into supporting the war by generals on a visit to Saigon. His ...”

“... Leone, an empty timeless Turkey, home of isolated, exotic acts of violence, but this return to urban life suggests the opposite, the not very well-off, rather crowded modern world where the ordinariness of crime and unhappiness, or the fact of their frequency, in George Eliot’s phrase, is their most telling feature. We ...”

“... books and music and more books. In my mind, Gwydir Street was the sophisticated centre of the urban world. Walk down it now, past the old Dewdrop Inn (a Victorian joke: ‘do drop in’) and you barely notice Number 186. A two-storey artisan’s cottage, just as ordinary from the outside as the rest, it is open – two days a week at least – as the ...”

“... are part of the 2020 protest to defund the New York Police Department in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Eisenman herself appears twice in the scene – as a sleeping form on the left of the picture and on the right with her son and daughter. This is a crowded urban fête champêtre, but also a commemoration of a ...”

“... other forms of discourse, and that they can be treated in other ways, we may turn to the Hungarian George Konrad. His earlier book The Case Worker has been highly praised, but I have not seen it. The City Builder, presented as fiction, is not a novel in any ordinary sense. It is not easily definable as anything else either: in fact, one would be tempted to ...”

“... Branson Coates Arca di Noe restaurant in Sapporo) to Beth Gali’s Montjuich cemetery; from urban engineering, such as Calatrava’s railway station in Zurich or Norman Foster’s Stansted air terminal, to a sprinkling of housing developments, culminating in Bofill’s deliberately magnificent ensemble in Cergy-Pontoise and Leon Krier’s deliciously ...”

“... sellers of food whose presence was, until relatively recently, an essential part of the European urban economy. Across the water from Dublin, hawkers were making sure that London’s population was well fed. They walked the streets in daylight and darkness, hauling barrows, baskets and ovens, cajoling donkeys and mules, offering fresh (and not-so-fresh but ...”