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“... material gives the reader a welcome breather – a leafy break – from the bat-winged frenzy of urban gothic The Black Veil otherwise purveys. Group therapy temporarily bumps Moody’s self-absorbed psyche out of the spotlight and allows him to redirect his gaze outwards, gain a modest perspective (since most of the other patients are worse off than he ...”

“... hadn’t won Iowa, the first state to vote, therefore it wasn’t worth much of an effort.) Mark Penn, the pollster who oversaw Bill’s 1996 re-election, was hired to run Hillary’s equally poll-driven campaign. (Penn’s specialty is dividing the electorate into minuscule special-interest groups and then devising messages for each one.) Much of ...”

“... for death than for the thwarted lives that precede it. Elegies are invariably pastoral but his are urban; V. doesn’t come from a country churchyard but from a cemetery above a used-up pit. Elegies are supposed to be one-offs, like funeral addresses, but his are recurrent – Continuous is the title of one of his collections – and sometimes come in numbered ...”

“... of nostalgic (and commodified) snapshots of the French countryside as an antidote to France’s urban and industrial ills. In 1849 Bonheur was awarded 3000 francs from the Ministry of the Interior for a grand composition of animals grazing. For its setting she chose the Nivernais, another relatively untouched corner of France, though one recently troubled ...”

“... under the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, a sui generis thinker whose ideas left a lasting mark. Good political thought, for Ankersmit, was never of the sort personified by Rawls: an abstract system of principles detached from concrete reality. It was always a response to urgent historical problems, produced by thinkers – Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Burke ...”

“... regional assemblies, and the third team have been recruited as placemen: management of the great urban areas, which will make or break the reform programme, is being handed over to the fourth team. In some sense this is a fine thing: we will have democracy at every level and large numbers of blacks will acquire jobs previously confined to a narrow Afrikaner ...”

“... he is allegedly explaining modern art. At the other end of the scale, realist works range from Mark Wallinger’s hyper-realist racehorse pictures and Richard Patterson’s monumental painting of a tiny plastic model of a minotaur through to the ‘bad’ and faux-naif portraiture of Martin Maloney and James Rielly. Other painters adapt traditional Realist ...”

“... this post at Court, urged on by her father. Whenever the Queen’s bell rang (‘so mortifying a mark of servitude’) she had to hurry to attend to her. Worst of all, she was left ‘unremittingly’ in the company of Mrs Schwellenberg, the Queen’s favourite courtier and the ‘Cerbera’ guarding the regal gate. Davenport catches the sheer ...”

“... responsibility, was soon identified as an unsightly nuisance, a blip on the unblemished myth of urban regeneration. The Owl Man was old and wild. He was raw nature against the pasteurised alternative, that eco-milkshake of green politics, donkeys in city farms, traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s sensational Wagnerian lightshow. Before ...”

“... with Republicans dominant in the conservative heartland but enjoying less appeal on the urban coastline. On closer inspection, the Republicans lose none of their menace, but they also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who ...”

“... taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered everything from a flea circus to a waxworks display under one roof. Books had their place along with vaudeville, Abolitionist songs and the Fiji mermaid. In ...”

“... Mariana, we have a startled sense of lost worlds. Shakespeare locates his comedy in the great urban capital of Vienna, and gives it three centres of action, one hearsay (the brothel) and two actual (the convent, the prison) – the first two, the convent and the brothel, always modulating into the third, the prison. The novice Isabella demands ‘a more ...”

“... his own bullet-points into company with their resounding dénouement, a bullet that clipped its mark. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op. ‘Let me get my ...”

“... and Atlas’s but also Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound), critical studies (Mark Shechner’s zesty Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth) and the fictionalised portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa ...”

“... it could be anything from a subversive political prank to a ‘psychogeographic’ drift through urban space. Some of the counter-cultural practices associated with the 1960s – the happening, the Be-In, the arts lab, the free festival – might qualify, at least before they became codified and commercialised; an inner-city riot or a wild-cat strike ...”