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“... of meeting him and living in his era. The Russian novelist Sinyavsky was probably closest to the mark when he called Zhivago ‘a weak novel of genius’. The contrast, in a sense, is between the poetry in it – what other novel has for hero a poet who could actually write the candle poem, ‘Winter Night’? – and the prose emotion, which is not up to a ...”

“... the impact of circumstances on men. Unlike the old, the ‘new’ history – economic, social, urban and demographic – explores people as categories, groups, statistics, abstractions, rather than as flesh-and-blood beings. ‘Mere’ biography is dismissed as attributing an unmerited significance to the trivial doings of trivial individuals. At best, it ...”

“... hard as an adult, dropping down from fatigue after long days, or sitting up to write or mark examinations after the family had gone to bed. He travelled the ringing grooves of change from city to city and school to school, following the slow, frustrating stages in the development of a national system of elementary education. He was not the architect ...”

“... and education had more relevance than the socialist programme of small craft producers to an urban society which lacked a modern industrial working class. In fact, Mazzini won an important following among the artisans of Northern and Central Italy, and after Unification his supporters were the first to create an organised political and economic movement ...”

“... indigenous population. The two bypasses squeeze the city from either side, leaving the overcrowded urban core to the Palestinians, and the hills and plains of Bethlehem for future settlement expansion. The PLO team at Oslo had no conception of the effects of schemes like the Bethlehem bypass – and indeed disregarded the warnings about the 'matrix of ...”

“... But they will have nothing to do with Gyuri, apart from selling him food. Coming from an urban, assimilated Jewish family, speaking no Yiddish and scarcely able to follow Hebrew prayers, he is spurned by them as a shaygets – a gentile kid. Back in Budapest, Gyuri and his friends used to argue about what it meant to be a Jew, now that ‘race’ had ...”

“... had a doctorate and had written a thesis on Bob Dylan. It also contained excited teenagers. Mark Stewart was a 6’7’’ white boy from Bristol who loved black music. In 1978, aged 17, he and four others formed the Pop Group. The conceptual cockiness of their name hinted at the scale of their ambitions. They intended to fuse the most avant-garde ...”

“... out propaganda work among the peasantry. As time went by, many of them turned their attention to urban workers; some became key figures in early Russian Marxism. And then there were the radicals – among them, Narodnaia Volia. The radicals held to the Bakuninite notion that beneath the placid surface of the Russian masses lay the elemental fury of ...”

“... tunnel, the least unreliable lift, was that the black hole at the epicentre of this vortex of urban restlessness was a necropolis to the age of cinema. The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child vagrant. Global-franchise tramp. Swiss ...”

“... characters, a distinctive and highly self-conscious prose style, a time of year, and a milieu of urban self-abuse and disaffection. But there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between the books. I’m glad to have the connection made for me, though, because it affords me the opportunity to consider the totality, so far, of a strange and ...”

“... the third and fourth centuries represented, as Fleming puts it, Britain’s ‘high-water mark of romanitas’. There were villas in every city and many small towns, some of them enormous and luxurious, like the one at Woodchester near Stroud, with its 8500 square-foot principal room. Some were no doubt occupied by Roman officials, but the majority ...”

“... Mugabe 27 per cent and Makoni 15 per cent. In fact these estimates were based on too narrow an urban sample and were too favourable both to Tsvangirai and Makoni, but the message was clear: Mugabe had lost. Enraged, he ordered the ZEC to declare him elected with 53 per cent. He was also angry at Makoni’s ‘treachery’ and demanded that his vote be ...”

“... systematically dynamited most of the remaining city, leaving it the most extensively demolished urban area in Europe. The uprising failed to achieve any military or political objective: in a memoir, Czeslaw Milosz condemned it as ‘an unforgivably reckless act’. Around 180,000 civilians were killed, among them many of Poland’s elite, who might later ...”

“... too blinkered or preoccupied to see. Yet we feel that here the limits of Hans’s awareness also mark the limits of O’Neill’s own – an impression reinforced when you read O’Neill’s non-fiction writing and discover that he writes in his own person much as Hans does, with the same slightly old-fashioned decorum, pointillist vividness and weakness for ...”

“... contingency personified, who enters Henry Perowne’s life in Saturday through that most random of urban events, the car accident. Trauma, in McEwan’s work, inaugurates a loss of innocence. After the mother’s death, the childhood garden is cemented over, in his first novel, and the children, now orphaned, set about creating their own, corrupted version of ...”