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“... in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It ...”

“... Later it was probably the fashion for personal monuments that led to intolerable overcrowding in urban graveyards, which had formerly been rather temporary places of deposit, the bones being removed later to an ossuary. In the 19th century people began to complain that the urban cemeteries were unhygienic. The great Paris ...”

“... seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises.Over the past twenty years, ranks of glass towers have risen up just south of the city’s old downtown. The second tallest building west ...”

“... without Walls, which is organised into sections on place, memory, blandness, ‘edgelands’ and urban regeneration, derives in one way or another from the TV programmes, but there are no photographs or screenshots. Some of the pieces look like composites, and there is a lot of repetition. No matter: it’s a joy to read. What Meades does most often is ...”

“... identifies the Jews as ‘a race older than civilisation’ whose culture is threatened by a new urban music which is ‘perhaps, the misunderstood utterance of prayer’. It is erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s ...”

“... parklands under the safeguard of the Forestry Commission, the decree neatly epitomises the way urban societies have come to think of woodlands (and of wilderness more generally) as zones of quiet retreat that stand in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking ...”

“... suffered were easily discovered: they tended to live in poor, cramped conditions in central urban areas that were decaying. They were more likely to be homeless than other groups. Even in 1974 they were far more likely to be unemployed, partly because their knowledge of the English language was poor. These kinds of disadvantage can be divided into two ...”

“... minority. This group, Scotland’s middle-class professionals, already accustomed to urban life and relatively secure, began to take part in Britain’s most ambitious political and cultural schemes. Empire was one; the expansion of the state after World War Two was another. When these came to an end, it was the ‘hurricane survivors’ who bore ...”

“... The late Graham Reynolds, keeper of the Department of Paintings, wrote the catalogue raisonné and Mark Evans, curator of this exhibition, was also responsible for John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum, which toured to the United States in 2012. But while that exhibition could be presented as offering an insight into the artist’s ...”

“... the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck of stories less mythical perhaps but in their own ways all as interesting and sui generis as that of Sid ...”

“... had clear antecedents in Indian tradition, but there was little cultural support, save among the urban, semi-Westernised élite, for the other ideas derived from the European Enlightenment. As a result, the modern ideology of the state quickly divided the political class into insider and outsiders. South Asia had its own political and communal traditions as ...”

“... now, the FN has also lamented the decline of French industry and called for the cleansing of inner urban areas, as zones of misrule that need to be policed and brought to heel. It isn’t just one, but two disappearing worlds that the party celebrates and commemorates in a single, long exhalation. The elegy for an ...”

“... in disputed circumstances, seems to have been a violent one. Like Jennifer, he is at odds with the urban life that has produced him. ‘I have always found it hard to believe in most things.’ He is contaminated by the traumas of others, crowded into a dirty city, deformed and energised by the ‘continual stare of its streets’. Kennedy makes de ...”

“... of art portraying or evoking country life, typically in a romanticised or idealised form for an urban audience’. In 1994, aged twenty, Rebanks too had a tiff with his father – a Cumbrian hill farmer – and went off to Australia. The farm where he spent nights making hay under tractor light confused him with its vastness. ‘Tens of thousands of sheep ...”

“... excoriates the artists’ nihilism, cynicism and tourist populism: he describes the ubiquity of urban decay, social ruination and personal degradation in their imagery as ‘urban pastoralism’, a late millennial equivalent of the rococo’s pleasure in swains and Bo-peeps frolicking in hayricks. ‘A pervasive and ...”