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“... Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy does for the market what the London Dungeon does for urban history. It’s a compendium of horror stories arising from what one might call the ryanairation of social life, the breakdown of once cash-free practices into severally billable units of account. Capitol Hill lobbying outfits now pay queuing firms to stand in line, sometimes overnight, so that the lobbyists can step in just before a committee session starts; ‘concierge’ medical companies offer queue-jumping treatment to those willing to stump up the fees ...”

“... beasts in foul holding-pens filled with shit, straw and stench; of the callous, jeering crowd – urban sophisticates and country bumpkins alike – thronging to Bedlam in their thousands to view the splendid entertainment offered by the spectacle of the raging and raving mad. Generations of Whiggish historians, celebrating the Victorian asylum as a triumph ...”

“... story of English architecture comes, in 1830, to a natural halting-place’ with the death of George IV, it was ‘scarcely … a place where one would wish to halt for long’. At no other point, he wrote, had architecture been ‘so feeble, so deficient in genius, so poor in promise’. The problem was that patronage had got into the wrong hands. He ...”

“... appeal: namely, an eerie topicality. At its simplest, it is a novel about the city of New York, an urban monster that devours its citizens. Wolfe’s hero is a WASP, Yale graduate, Wall street investment banker, called Sherman McCoy. Thirty-eight years old, and over-extended on a million a year, McCoy is a yuppie, to use a term Wolfe studiosly doesn’t ...”

“... and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic nor narrowly ...”

“... Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as a humanitarian mission. The ...”

“... Murder Mystery) Awake in Spain is a hotchpotch of shepherds, Audenesque pastoral airmen, urban gay camp, Shakespearean aristocrats-in-the-woods and what William Empson called the child-as-swain: TWO SHEPHERDS: We love the country, that’s why we’re handsome, it’s love love love love love. We only quarrel over sheep. We’re terribly ...”

“... had votes. It was all the more necessary for property to pay its ‘ransom’. In Britain, Lloyd George was the greatest exponent of radical prudence. Labour’s great victory in 1945 was based on an alliance of the poor working classes of the North with sections of the urban middle classes and the more prosperous working ...”

“... of universal knowledge. In this demanding, encyclopedic form it claimed some casualties: not only George Eliot’s Casaubon and the Mark Pattison upon whom the character is often said to be based, but H.H. Vaughan, Regius Professor of History. Gradually an accommodation between the two groups was worked out. Engel closes with a fine analysis of the effects of ...”

“... he is just beginning to write the prospectus for the ‘somewhere a dog barked’ school of eerie, urban fiction. The second Appendix struck a personal chord with me. All it does is describe the rules and display the coloured playing cards for ‘Action Baseball’, a game Auster devised during his scamming and scheming period to hustle some extra cash. I’ve ...”

“... store clerks or in the Seattle streets, sleeping it off under the highway with the other ‘urban Indians’ who can’t make their way home. But though their landscape is bleak, these first two books share a kind of warmhearted, comic brutality. ‘Your father was always half crazy,’ Victor’s mother tells him. ‘And the other half was on ...”

“... and gender affirmation surgery. The people documented in these books were rich and poor, rural and urban, fixed and itinerant, literate and illiterate, French, British and American. Some had sex with men, some with women, some with both, some with no one at all. Almost all were white and, Manion shows, on the rare occasions when journalists and police did ...”

“... while giving them a taste of disrespectful oratory, and second to introduce Germany’s hopelessly urban intellectuals to their own country, their own compatriots. We did a Grassian bus party in 1997, raising the wind for the referendum that would bring back a Scottish Parliament. Two differences from Germany: we made use of the Scottish fondness for music and ...”

“... and, despite the growing prevalence among his audiences of a neoclassical taste for satirical urban realism, throughout his career he scripted scenes in which Hymen personally ratifies the ending of a comedy, or Hercules abandons Antony, or Jupiter descends on an eagle. The first published review of his work, in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit ...”

“... on Wes Anderson’s 2009 animated version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Voiced smoothly by George Clooney, this fox is a gallant, wolf-phobic gentleman, a dreamer who writes a newspaper column and suffers an existential crisis that involves one master plan, three bandit hats and lots of gear. He doesn’t have much in common with the medieval ...”