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“... introduced the basic tenets of Marxist thought into a vernacular that would be acceptable to the urban poor.’ This is about as accurate as referring to George Orwell as a Marxist. It is true, however, that Shariati sought out the common ground between Marxist activism and Islamic radicalism, and this certainly helped ...”

“... pardons or commutations had not applied to the Department of Justice for clemency. On 2 July 2007, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence on Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. Libby had been convicted the previous March of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the CIA agent Valerie ...”

“... only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious campaign as an independent, which broke new ground by rallying the white working class against intellectuals and anti-war hippies. Though always less popular than Johnson, Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic ...”

“... or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished Boston’s book culture ...”

“... in film during the Great Depression. More than any other single man, John Wayne would reconnect urban and suburban, blue and white collar, Cold War America to its mythic national past. From 1948 to 1968, the years of John Wayne’s pre-eminence, war films and Westerns were America’s most popular entertainment. Every year from 1949 to the eve of US defeat ...”

“... in the outtakes. And they get grimmer and grimmer. Perhaps what’s terrifying about these new urban landscapes is that they imply the possibility of a life lived as one long outtake. The world seems to be made more and more of stuff we’re not supposed to look at, a banal infrastructure that supports the illusion of automotive independence, the largely ...”

“... sometimes under pressure – as in parts of France – sometimes ‘naturally’, particularly in urban areas, as ‘hygienic standards were internalised’ and ‘a new body code of behaviour and new sets of attitudes emerged.’ Families, particularly mothers, were more influential than schools or hospitals in changing attitudes, and in the process ‘both ...”

“... Can you feel it? My heart-beat. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Boy George. All the smiley tee-shirts are smiling at me. Smiling faces flash on and off out of the darkness because they are happy. Happiness is in fashion. I am embraced by several people I do not know. Smoke drifts from the little nozzles of electric ...”

“... vaporous – oddly because that might seem to be a way of not coming across (though one remembers George Eliot’s pungent vapour Stephen Guest). Perhaps Highsmith can’t quite bear to think that the matter to be contemplated is less that of a liveliness, a life, annulled than of a collusion between something of a personal nullity and modelling’s nubile ...”

“... bonfires. But what makes us most vulnerable is the abruptness of what is called the ‘wildland-urban interface’, where real estate collides with fire ecology. And castles without their glacises are not very defensible. On 26 October, day six of the fires, I saw the ruins – perched precariously on a wild mountainside – of what my friend Kozy Amemiya ...”

“... a day or two the steps had been transformed into a slope of glinting paper, the flowers strangely urban behind the police cordon. It was also a slope of words: handwritten messages, emails, shop-bought cards and pavement script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on ...”

“... of Jewishness and Arabness – made up the polyglot mix of the eastern Mediterranean and urban Egypt. Henein had been educated in Paris and spent part of his childhood in Rome, and the cry against fascism he raised in 1938 must be put in the context of conditions in Italy and the ambitions of Mussolini in Africa – his new Roman empire. Many of the ...”

“... Blair was our MP. I don’t remember there being any kudos attached to this, apart from the time George W. Bush visited in the autumn of 2003 and Blair took him for a pint at a nearby pub. In 2007, a few months after Blair resigned as prime minister, I went to Cambridge to start my degree, the first in my family to go straight from school to university. I ...”

“... of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to Wakefield, where George Gissing is not commemorated as fully as he might be – too ‘grim’, perhaps, and too heavily challenged, like many formerly industrial towns and all socialist novelists, for a happy ending. McKie’s purpose is not so much to deny that present-day ...”

“... with contempt and unacknowledged love.’ Maxley’s trauma serves as a licence for reveries on urban loneliness and his feeling that modern life is inauthentic and ‘filthy’. Though he’s presented as a victim of arrested development, a lack of ironic distance means he often comes across as a spokesman for male self-pity who hasn’t finished digesting ...”