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“... and Marlowe and their legion of imitators is that he is based – or has been so far – not in urban America in the Thirties and Forties, but in the Berlin of that period. The first two novels were set in the Nazi era: March Violets (1989) in the early months of the regime, and The Pale Criminal (last year) in 1938. The plots started off with conventional ...”

“... account of the city. An anthropologist teaching in Atlanta, he writes in the tradition of urban studies established by Mike Davis’s pathbreaking City of Quartz. But there is more ethnographic texture in Davis’s Los Angeles: Rutheiser’s subject, which invokes a term invented by Disney, is ‘Imagineering’, the promotional synthesis of ...”

“... as an outdated Confucianism, championing the rights of workers, making legible the lives of the urban and rural poor, opposing what they increasingly saw as the oppression of arranged marriages and even writing approvingly about homosexuality. The notion of 20th-century Vietnam as a little China was increasingly unsustainable, but the sense of a Vietnamese ...”

“... Commuter suburbs spreading along railway lines gave pause for thought. But the outrush of urban populations in the United States since the Second World War, in tandem with car ownership, was on a graver scale. If that exodus was unprecedented, it was also logical. The rights to freehold tenure and development are entrenched in American values, while ...”

“... why the media’s portrayal of a community split into gay and anti-gay supporters in the wake of Mark Simpson’s collection of essays is a joke. The media seem to need to believe that an entity called ‘the gay community’ actually exists. I am not so sure. I used to like thinking there was, before I had the nerve to come out. In those days I probably ...”

“... Imperial Rome, or even (it is too probable) Periclean Athens – here touted once again as an urban model. No wonder that a quarter of a million cluster in daily from the developing world’s arduous and lonely countryside to join the party. The fact that most modern cities look ugly and cruel, and contain a visibly miserable underclass, hardly ...”

“... Like West Germany, Italy has resorted to the suspension of civil liberties to deal with urban terrorism – which is just what the Red Brigades would expect. The Espresso package brings home, with sickening force, the moral torture and brutality involved in the crime of kidnapping. Moro was, of course, the supreme political kidnap. That photograph ...”

“... betrayal is out.’ Rice’s analyses of Chinese society – or, more exactly, of the urban society of China, because he hardly seems to have ventured into the countryside – are anecdotal, but not lacking in perception. Thus China does not have one ‘generation gap’ he argues, but at least three. The four demographic bands are 1. the Old ...”

“... a female friend called S–, a heroin addict whose experiences are evoked by Muldoon with the hard urban wit he first developed in ‘Immram’: That was the year Mike Fink was a bouncer at ‘The Bitter End’ on Bleecker Street: ‘The times are out of kilter,’ he remarked to S–, eyeing the needle-tracks on her arms. S– seems perpetually in and out ...”

“... since the days of the New Deal, beyond the level of freeways and land-use zoning, found that urban free ways were gumming up and that zoning had neither improved inner-city ghettoes nor prevented the endless spread of subtopia. Above all, planning, to the British public, meant town planning. This was widely perceived to have done little more than create ...”

“... it was imagined. But this was also a fractured and embattled world. By the fourth century, the urban upper classes no longer held a monopoly over power at a local level. Rather, civic notables competed for influence with new groups – military officers, imperial officials and holders of court titles – who derived their rank and status from far beyond ...”

“... arriving in the Liberty were less important in 1520 than they were in 1470. We also find an urban economy growing less, not more, booming as the 16th century progressed. Clothworking had largely died out by 1560, and the number of tanners began to drop by 1590. Power in Havering during the 16th and 17th centuries was shifting, not from land to ...”

“... are you looting for? asked the evening news.’ The protests that followed the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police are reduced to a set of sensational images: ‘a bus set on fire,/hooded boys with overgrown nails’; ‘a police helmet with a broken visor,/horses clumsy-trotting through piles of debris’.A correspondent in the riot zone asked anold man ...”

“... on the streets to make them resemble the US cities they are standing in for. We don’t have urban ghettoes, we don’t glorify violence outside the hockey arena and we don’t shoot each other in the streets. There is nothing like the gunfight at the OK Corral, the St Valentine’s Day Massacre or the Vietnam War in Canadian history. Social studies ...”

“... The image is not just a foreign legend. It was Tocqueville who first supplied it, as the brand-mark of French Absolutism and the Revolution that followed it. In modern times, its element of truth lies in the exceptional position of Paris as political and intellectual centre of the nation, a position occupied by no other city in a European society of ...”