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“... A folk memory of industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the love affair with suburbia that replaced it? Howard imagined that the problem of London could be solved only by its extinction ...”

“... Turkifying, state-centric ideology of the founding vanguard came to be known, was supported by the urban elites of the country’s western cities, but elsewhere – in the Anatolian provinces and the south-east, the area closest to the Middle East – the reforms achieved at best a superficial penetration. Nearly a century later, a new cultural revolution is ...”

“... finance, fashion and culture, thereby concentrating in one swollen metropolis all those diverse urban functions which, in the United States, were divided up between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of ...”

“... In the 1990s New York was the capital city of America’s economic boom: now it is the epicentre of urban insecurity. The city is familiar with crisis, however, and no one could say it had surrendered to the new and old dangers it faces. Although disaster experts warn that a dirty bomb could result in the evacuation of millions of panicked residents and require the demolition of contaminated buildings and streets, the demand for real estate continues to escalate and housing prices are higher than they were in 2001 ...”

“... harbour (which never happened), is a confused mess, but is intended to show that this semi-feudal urban world ended in 1863. The few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in ...”

“... ephemeral enthusiast of Comtean Positivism, assistant editor of the Westminster Review, George Eliot had, from a typically English standpoint, exactly the wrong credentials for launching herself, fairly late in the day, as a writer of imaginative fiction. One might add that she had the wrong sort of body, too; but to recall her sex is to resolve the ...”

“... paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central Park, and the Ramble, a wooded area popular with birdwatchers, is one of them. Cooper is 57 – almost exactly the age Joe ...”

“... to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life. The dean of Gissing studies, Pierre ...”

“... by rats. But these men report only goldfish and terrapins. There are no alligators: that’s an urban myth. Apart from the hand grenade, they’ve never found any explosives either. ‘There are sewers,’ Smith says later, standing in front of a huge sewer map in his office, ‘that run very close to places you couldn’t otherwise get access to.’ He ...”

“... Duff became head of MI5 in 1984 he was keen to reduce the importance of F Branch. As he told Mark Urban, he was supported by the majority of his staff ‘except for a handful of old sweats in middle management’. Duff seems to have been a new force within MI5: one intelligence officer told Urban admiringly that ‘he could ...”

“... moralists who thought façade painting as disreputable as face painting. The great protagonist of urban stucco, the designer whose fresh-as-paint parks and park-side buildings are most generous to the changing appearance of the people around them, is John Nash. His career can be followed in the pictures in the late Michael Mansbridge’s illustrated catalogue ...”

“... He is, of course, an immensely prolific writer, who has published one well-regarded monograph on urban landlords, a sheaf of learned articles on cognate aspects of economic history, and a mixed handful of speculative and wide-ranging essays. But he is not chiefly renowned for his own research: instead his reputation is sustained by his literary talents. This ...”

“... in A la recherche du temps perdu – and also the last, one complete, 2500-page orbit later – is George Sand’s François le champi, the first ‘real’ novel the narrator remembers having read. Or rather, remembers having had read to him, by his mother on that seminal evening of anxiety when she fails to come up and give him a goodnight kiss. The ...”

“... the war. Had she joined the Forces, she might have escaped what one of her disenchanted courtiers, George Urban, called her ‘Alf Garnett’ view of Germany. As of Hitler, Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what she thought of the European Community. She did not like international organisations as such. She disliked the United Nations and the ...”

“... lying, or writhing about, in clay – a ‘telltale sign,’ observes Kramer, ‘of an immaculate, urban middle-class upbringing’. Simonds moved on to making models of primitive landscapes filled with the ‘habitations of an imaginary race of migratory little people’ which have proved popular both with museums and with private collectors. I haven’t seen ...”