“... 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 ...”

“... argument to work in the games I wrote, with the occasional help of an older, savvier boy called Mark who lived round the corner. There was no objective way to determine whether the story was any good, however: that depended on whether or not anyone enjoyed playing it. And the only person who ever played the games I wrote was me. My older sister wasn’t ...”

“... radically alien. Even that wasn’t the end of it. The banning of prayer in schools seemed to mark the expulsion of religious morality from the American state; the renewal of mass immigration, suspended between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s, brought the white middle and working class face to face with a new set of ethnic challenges and rivals; and the ...”

“... Scottish Presbyterians, archetypes of fissile conviction, and show that schism isn’t always a mark of decline. The energy of opposition can bring renewal: Presbyterians sometimes split to survive. In the Highlands rival congregations exist side by side: the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the ...”

“... the Holy Mother’ Bukowski is calling here for a poetry which articulates the sensibility of the urban poor. Having lived this life, he identifies its sensibility with what Dos Passos called the ‘wants that crawl over the skin like ants’. It follows, for Bukowski at least, that if these wants are to receive poetic expression, that poetry must observe the ...”

“... Henri, who had founded the Ashcan School – a movement that championed gritty depictions of urban scenes. ‘I didn’t want to be taught Impressionism,’ Neel explained. ‘I didn’t see life as Picnic on the Grass. I wasn’t happy like Renoir.’ Her latest retrospective, Alice Neel: Every Person is a New Universe, at the Munch Museum in Oslo ...”

“... of the Tolstoyans or the Bolsheviks, or in each direction in turn. Young people who formed urban communes were as likely to be inspired by Tolstoy as by Marx (or by Marx as Tolstoy); and the enthusiasts who went to the countryside to form agricultural communes and collective farms included Tolstoyans and Bolsheviks. To be sure, these Tolstoyan pioneers ...”

“... deal to further the careers of two young writers who became his closest friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. He published much of their early fiction and reviewed them in other magazines. He opened the Atlantic to Southern writers in the aftermath of the Civil War; and at Harper’s, where his power was even greater if less direct, he promoted women writers ...”

“... the opposite of this conventional view. The demise of the Soviet system occurred at the high-water mark of Western civil societies. Among its unintended consequences are the unravelling of the post-war political settlements in the major Western countries and a burgeoning legitimation crisis for their market institutions. Moreover, our economies are being ...”

“... specifically boys. His best-known boys’ books are a trilogy of survivalist novels about an urban adolescent, Brian Robeson, stranded in a Canadian wilderness: Hatchet, which sold over a million copies, Hatchet: The Return and Hatchet: Winter, which Paulsen claims to have written in response to fan mail (‘as many as two hundred letters a day’). The ...”

“... from her writings: ‘Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture … they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.’ Sontag managed to make it such that though you knew homosexuality was involved in all ...”

“... Nervousness and nostalgia mark these three novels. The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the frontiers of representation, constantly checking their credentials, never quite venturing into full-blooded fictional territory ...”

“... dangerous. Hassan, our driver, turned up in a black suit with stripes like railway lines, to mark the end of summer. It clashed badly with his plastic sandals and his brown tie. I looked out of my hotel window and watched the rain with a certain frisson: I remembered being told by a leading Palestinian figure that Saddam Hussein had forecast that an ...”

“... the Muirhouse-based purveyor of inferior opiate products, the one who sold the suppositories Mark Renton shat out in the bookies’ toilet. And he was delightful at it, smirking and giggling in his Wattie Buchan T-shirt, like the total amateur he was. He’s back as Forrester again in the sequel, fencing stolen goods from one of the many underworldly ...”

“... furious inauguration speech with its talk of ‘American carnage’ was a declaration of war on urban racial liberalism, especially as represented by New York, the city that had rejected him.Trump’s outlook was formed during the bitter racial conflicts of New York City in the Koch and Giuliani years, when blue-collar whites – joined by many ...”