“... structures’ and the emergence of the modern nation-state. In the 1630s, as Thomas mentions, George Herbert could write that ‘My friend may spit upon my curious floor’; by the end of the period, it was the spitting rather than the floor that would seem curious. Urination could still be public or semi-public, within limits. In the first decade of the ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... class rather than of sex’. Asquith needed no such reminder, if only because Churchill and Lloyd George had done quite enough reminding when they explained their reasons for opposing the Conciliation Bill (an attempted all-party-compromise, property-franchise measure) in 1910. Nor is Garner right to endorse Sylvia Pankhurst’s claim that her deputation of ...”

“... or is in any way apologetic) and has a personality at the centre. It has some of the qualities of George Malcolm Young’s Portrait of an Age: Victorian England – superb broken-field running and coiled argument humanised by a delight in words and conversation. It is – ironically, for Burrow is a Cantabridgian – more Young than Herbert Butterfield on the ...”

“... those who’ve been there say: ‘My God! The drive from the airport!’ They mean the drive from George Bush Intercontinental Airport, down Interstate 45 or 59. It’s a ten or 12-lane highway, flanked by teeming feeder roads, and you career along it to the gathering rhythm of power pylons, used car lots, motels, the cacophony of billboards selling ...”

“... fact that city-killer weapons arrived at the precise moment that humanity became a predominantly urban species.Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in war since 1945, but there have been many close calls. In 1956, a B-47 bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean with two nuclear weapons on board. It was never found. In 1960, US nuclear early warning systems ...”

“... attraction at the Tower, thus promoting the sport from the disreputable status it enjoyed in the urban bear gardens. For better viewing, James refashioned the Lion Tower, but there was little he could do about the vile stench of offal brought by the barge-load for his beasts’ consumption. His master of the bears was Edward Alleyn, more reputably known as ...”

“... refugees have been expelled from the mostly poor rural areas of southern Lebanon into the larger urban centres, particularly Beirut, which will put intolerable strain on Lebanon’s delicate social structure. Shimon Peres attempted the same tactic during the brief incursions into Lebanon of 1996, which led to the massacre of unarmed civilians taking refuge ...”

“... and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead and was beaten almost into blindness; prisoners ...”

“... he writes less than he might have done, has affairs with vicious boys and slips into retirement. George Loftus, who comes from the institute where Philip used to work, to clean the Layburn pictures, is too young to have long memories and ponders his unrequited interest in the institute’s red-haired receptionist. The centrepiece of the still life is Bob and ...”

“... is suddenly cut by a misty blue crayon-stroke. It might be close, a hilltop apartment block in urban Essex, or it might be very far off and so huge as to disable the eye’s distance-judgment. This is Canary Wharf, towering over England. It isn’t so long ago that this was a persuasive image. In the Eighties, the accumulation of personal wealth and ...”

“... was probably acquired from a Cockney immigration officer), he was a subject of King George V, and therefore, as he spent a lifetime explaining to interviewers, not a refugee. ‘After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a comedown,’ Hobsbawm remembered. ‘Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those ...”

“... 1935 collage. There’s Al Freuh’s jaunty economical outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan spinning his cane, Paolo Garretto’s Babe Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and ...”

“... before the next wave of construction and destruction.’ The fierce polemics of the time – ‘urban v. anti-urban, romantic v. rationalist, and traditional means of building v. high technology’ – made for a more critical discourse on architecture than ever before. At the end, Jones and Woodward expressed the hope ...”

“... Now is the time of schism.I grew up in the Free Church of Scotland. I knew it as a community of urban Highlanders with Calvinist theology and socially conservative politics in which everyone knew everyone, not just at the congregational level but across the country. It was its own world and only an anthropologist’s kinship chart could capture the full web ...”