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“... their pleasure and their politics. Their homes, however, remained some of the worst in Britain. Mark Hudson’s Coming Back Brockens – subtitled ‘A Year in a Mining Village’ – extends this anti-heroic narrative, though from the standpoint of a travel writer and a man of letters rather than, as in Beatrix Campbell’s case, that of embattled ...”

“... oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost ...”

“... additions to the genre in the USA: The Yuppie Handbook (‘the state-of-the-art manual for Young Urban Professionals’) and The Official Young Aspiring Professionals Fast-Track Handbook. There seems to be no precise equivalent for the Young Aspiring Professional in Thatcher’s Britain: the Tory Trade Unionist (or TUTU) might fill the bill in some ways, but ...”

“... There is a picture of Mark Rothko taken at his East Hampton studio in 1964. He is sitting on one of those solid wooden beach chairs that stand around on the porches of Long Island summer cottages, looking at one of his own paintings as one might look at the sea, patiently pursuing all that his picture has in it. He was famous for this: for attending on the effect of each change in the angle or intensity of light, for looking close up and far off ...”

“... recondite intellectual sources on which it drew. Although its founding editors – Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Benjamin Kunkel and Marco Roth – have also been prolific contributors, the journal has never had a single voice. But it has had a recognisable character or style: East Coast urban (its home, physically and ...”

“... Easter 1916: both Irish nationalism and queer nationalism locate their mythological origins in an urban riot. Impertinent as it might seem to claim the Irish Rebellion as a prototype of Stonewall, O’Neill – who is not above making obscene puns on Ireland’s ‘rising’ – does finally invite us to view Stonewall as a latter-day gay replica of Easter ...”

“... Chiang Kai-shek celebrated his 50th birthday (by the Chinese way of counting) in October 1936. To mark the occasion, every schoolchild in the country – or in those parts not already occupied by the Japanese army – was instructed to contribute 15 cents, and every teacher one dollar, to help purchase fighter planes from the US ...”

“... to make any sort of call from. So folk memory insists, at any rate. So literature insists too. Urban phone booths in particular have become indelibly associated in the literary imagination with urine. What invariably greets the protagonists of genre fiction as they open the door of a booth to make some life or death call is the stickiness left behind by a ...”

“... One of the two plays in the repertoire was a farce Dickens co-authored for the occasion with Mark Lemon. All the while Dickens continued his management of Urania Cottage, Angela Burdett Coutts’s home for the reformation of prostitutes, supervising it daily on the most minute matters. He was constantly visiting magistrate’s courts, prisons and other ...”

“... jealous Yahweh’s divine vengeance. As the distances between people grow, so do the places which mark their differences; Babel grew from the rubble. Setting aside altogether the countervailing tradition of an architecture of bliss – the Heavenly Jerusalem, the Eternal City – Sennett advocates an existential acceptance of permanent exile from radiance, to ...”

“... last few months of life in discussion of Christian doctrine. A poet who could not have been more urban in outlook lay dying in the depths of Oxfordshire; he had once said that he could behave only in the country, and that when he got as far as Brentford on his return to town, ‘the devill entred into him and never left him till he came into the country ...”

“... into account the documents and books created by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, monastic houses, urban administrations, landed estates, merchants, lawyers, and even some peasants, we can begin to appreciate the scale of parchment production. It adds up to a lot of dead sheep. Paper first arrived in England in the 13th century. The technology itself was very ...”

“... elaborate temples and stupas. Everywhere we went was packed with middle-class Chinese tourists – urban people are now free to travel without permits. We were told beforehand that the festival would arrange to take us on a four-day jeep trip deep into the mountains, and I had come prepared with my Greenland gear. The expedition turned out to be a five-bus ...”

“... Force, reporting on routes to redress, subheaded its report ‘Compensation Culture: Exploding the Urban Myth’. Shortly afterwards, legislation was enacted to control the claims management business and to shore up defences to negligence claims, while the Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee found that, far from there being a compensation culture, there ...”

“... bluish mauve. The array seems to distil many of the experiences of colour currently on offer in urban Britain. It translates the patterns of dresses, T-shirts, shopping bags and car paint passing along the Horseferry Road; it’s echoed by commercial and institutional showrooms; it enlarges on the toolbars capping my computer screen. Colours ...”