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“... impressions and cultural meditation that Sebald manages so smoothly is harder to bring off in an urban setting, without the plausibly sustaining medium of solitude. A typical passage in Open City starts firmly anchored in time and place: ‘From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view ...”

“... wrote about love, and war, and history, and banditry, but the to and fro between the rural and the urban – between the lives of the roués and guards officers and princesses in St Petersburg and the lives of the family estates that pay for their champagne – underlay everything. The mood of the gentry in the country and the mood of the gentry in the city ...”

“... institutions, especially the new National Gallery, are detached from the sordid realities of urban life. The Royal Academy moved into the east wing of Wilkins’s building in 1837 while the National Gallery occupied the west, opening to the public on 5 April 1838. In the same month the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’s third novel, was ...”

“... the rediscovery of patriotism by the British intelligentsia. Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene and George Orwell all undertook patriotic work for the BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely national’. ‘Our culture,’ he ...”

“... of ‘history from below’, such as Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé, even though their Marxism was anathema to him. His magnum opus, on the armées révolutionnaires, the semi-vigilante armed bands who enforced the Terror in the provinces in 1793-4, might, in theory, have formed part of a marxisant ...”

“... 18 October, precisely at the time when Theroux was eulogising South London on TV as a delightful urban safari park, I was robbed at knife point in Brixton. The frog who dared to croak is Richard Sennett’s first novel and umpteenth book. Like other philosophers (Russell, Wollheim, Scruton, Koestler), he evidently sees fiction as something he ought to chance ...”

“... knew. Even royalty could not escape the pressure for a youthful silhouette. The immensely vain George IV found that the glass of fashion would not flatter him as it had Henry VIII, for he lived in an age when monarchs had less power, and fashion, in a society that was increasingly urban and wealthy, had more. The padded ...”

“... that echo Romantic longings, and live according to the dynamics of the countryside rather than the urban ff furioso; she took a meditative turn against ‘the getting and spending [that] lay waste our powers’. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011) by the American writer George Prochnik ...”

“... fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or ...”

“... looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too. Never one to underestimate his own impact, he reported to his second wife, Nowell, that a colleague had said he was ‘one of three English public men who could command the ...”

“... to accentuate as abate class feeling, as better-off families migrated to leafy suburbs away from urban smells and noise. Working-class women entered those suburban fastnesses not as housewives but as workers, for – interwar moaning about the servant problem notwithstanding – only after 1945 did domestic service go into serious decline. The fact that both ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St George, in the Crimea, to Kalerga, on the Bulgarian shore. Information about the course of the war was brought to the British public with great speed by the Times’s Applegath rotary printing press, which could deliver ten thousand impressions an hour. It’s ...”

“... pioneered by Southey, Pugin and others, of contrasting the barren squalor of industrial workers’ urban existence with an idealised picture of the settled, organic, hierarchical relations of the Middle Ages. His indictment of the present exhibited not just an intense sympathy with the exploited poor of industrialising Britain, but also a raging condemnation ...”

“... to suppress rebellion in Ireland. Rural resentment erupted in riots against land enclosure, while urban animosity was directed at courtiers who enriched themselves through monopolies and other lucrative privileges conferred by an ageing monarch. Unsurprisingly, popular ‘expectations were unrealistically high that as a new broom [James] would sweep away old ...”