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“... We have one more thing: the most nerve-straining title of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving ...”

“... and heroic figures of the revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic remained those of the old urban patriciates: Athens, Sparta and above all pre-Imperial Rome. ‘Patriotism’ signified the actual or supposed attitude of ancient aristocratic élites towards their own city-countries, and their opposition to malevolent and obscurantist despots ...”

“... saw the demonstration as evidence of the intellectual and emotional sterility induced in the urban Irish by sexual abstinence – something he himself knew a lot about, though apparently not suffering the same effects. As time went by he talked more and more about his distaste for the Dublin populace, which broke up Synge’s play, kept shops or worked ...”

“... the reference to the ‘North’. For English Romantics, the question of authenticity broke along urban/rural lines; for German Romantics, the difference was ethno-historical. Hölderlin’s Germans, like Herder’s, are a stunted, half-finished people. But instead of trying to prepare the way for a cultural renaissance, Hölderlin wanted to solve the problem ...”

“... city in the country.’ Such bursts of rural defiance, Kazin observes, were no help in converting urban voters to the cause. The big city politicians returned the disdain. They were Democrats too, but Bryan did not speak to them or their followers. Populist economics constantly touched the great American antinomies. Bryan’s egalitarian campaigns ...”

“... he’d decamped for Europe nearly a decade before. Neon had just arrived on Broadway along with George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good! The lights turned Times Square into a celebration of American individualism (‘name in lights’); the Gershwin songs turned Manhattan into a playground, ‘an isle of joy’. At a stroke, a new ...”

“... some extent makes up for it. The relations of literacy, religion and education are mapped; so is urban gentrification – no quotes around the word now; the movements of convicts and bushrangers; Aboriginal landscapes and Aboriginal resistance, as well as the more obvious geographies of climate, land use and weather.In the helpful Guide to Sources ...”

“... of its state revenue from the export of petroleum. By that point, the country had become heavily urban: 16 of its 19 million people lived in cities, a significant majority below the poverty line, with many in extreme poverty. Most of these urban poor resided in shanty towns sprawling up along the mountain walls that ...”

“... of London, Maurice Thomson was securing the Thames and fetching vessels from Holland, his brother George – now army colonel and MP for Southwark – manning the perimeter of the South Bank; one of his partners was ensconced as private secretary to Cromwell; a few months later, another was to figure in joint planning with the Levellers for the coup to put an ...”

“... of the inspector general’. In his just published memoirs, Bremer dwells on infighting within George Bush’s cabinet and his claim that he tried and failed to get the number of US troops in Iraq increased. Bremer also says that he ‘realised there would be corruption at many levels of Iraqi society in the months and years to come. But I also hoped that ...”

“... instability’ that threatened access to resources and paved the way for Communist penetration. George Kennan, the theorist of containment, argued that it was ‘better to have a strong regime in power’ in Latin America ‘than a liberal government if it is indulgent’ to Communists. And Washington helped make sure things stayed that way, funding and ...”

“... local council building in Saronikou, a cluster of settlements just beyond the edge of Athens’s urban sprawl. The council’s spiffy new building is elegant, light and spacious, all marble floors and veneered partitions. The mayor, Petros Filippou, an amiable veteran of local politics, has the patriarchal desk set-up I saw so many times in former Soviet ...”

“... of the first lipogram; Ausonius, master of the cento; Arnaut Daniel, inventor of the sestina; George Herbert for his emblematic poems; Edgar Allan Poe (the Philosophy of Composition); Lewis Carroll; Raymond Roussel; Unica Zürn, sublime anagrammatist’. Oulipianism, in short, is not cliquish: it demonstrates its generic credentials by being found to ...”

“... that their territorial rivalries were a continuation, not only of earlier forms of gang ritual in urban working-class neighbourhoods, but also of the violent territorial conflicts of pre-industrial village society. Pearson also challenges the belief that the two world wars created stability and cohesion on the home front. The Great War was accompanied by a ...”

“... he makes a good and still largely unfashionable case for Victorian ‘restorers’, notably Sir George Gilbert Scott. It emerges that the villains were often the relevant Dean and Chapter, who then told some shocking lies in order to transfer responsibility from themselves to their architects. He very reasonably asks why we should think late medieval ...”