Search Results

“... Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ended, when HBO launched Lena Dunham’s Girls ...”

“... as concomitant with but not inevitably subservient to that of the young United States: 1776 might mark the founding of the US, but he claims it also marked the declaration of independence of another ‘empire’ two thousand miles away – the Lakota Sioux. A former farming people from the Missouri River valley, the Lakota had started a series of explorations ...”

“... moving from central Birmingham to Bournville, and Joseph Rowntree, which shifted production from urban York to suburban Haxby Road. Once the Cadburys took charge of Fry’s, they enforced change, and in 1920 a site of nearly 300 acres was bought in a meander of the River Avon, a few miles east of Bristol, outside the little town of Keynsham. In 1923, the ...”

“... This had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was ...”

“... had been one in 1933 and another in 1951) had been explicit about the danger gambling posed to the urban working classes, who were believed to be both more susceptible to its lure and more likely to suffer from its consequences. The Rothschild Commission went out of its way to note that a bit of light gambling might actually be good for the morale of people ...”

“... short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were ...”

“... activity. Eyes down watching the blade and glancing behind to check on the quality of the mark you have made, seeing it not quite correct, not bulbous enough, or unevenly rounded, finding the tail too elongated, not sharply enough defined, and beginning again to make it better, eventually to make it right. It’s that I imagine myself doing now.My ...”

“... to reach Glasgow directly. Port Glasgow found its future as a shipbuilding town, making its mark in industrial history and the pantheon of Scottish innovation by launching Europe’s first commercial steamship, the Comet, in 1812. Migrant workers arrived from the Highlands and the rural Lowlands, and especially from the place Victorian writers nicely ...”

“... had ended. And the Census of 1851 shows you what: for the first time in British history the urban population was greater than the rural. Yet the cult of the landscape continues even now as if nothing had changed.In 1867 it became illegal to employ women and children in gangs providing cheap labour in the fields. This was a small social improvement at a ...”

“... heard that it said that Iraq was a more effective training ground than Afghanistan, because ‘the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980s.’ I heard ...”

“... 30 per cent of the population in Turkey, it draws more heavily on a teeming underclass of urban slum-dwellers which scarcely existed in postwar Europe. But the dynamic core of the party comes from a stratum of newly enriched Anatolian entrepreneurs, completely modern in their approach to running a profitable business, and devoutly traditional in their ...”

“... who detest it. Viewed historically, however, comparisons with Vargas, let alone Perón, miss the mark. The differences between their forms of rule and Lula’s are fundamental. Not that the great practitioners of populism in Brazil and Argentina were all that alike themselves. Vargas’s rhetoric was paternalist and sentimental, Perón’s rousing and ...”

“... power too. The result was a cycle of rebellions in a society where it was easier to make an urban revolution than to hold a fair election. But with the overthrow of its latest oppressor, the chances of a democratic evolution had improved: the Kyrgyz leaders to emerge from it had learned some political lessons from the past, and introduced a ...”

“... Congress rather than the Muslim League, but it was not enough to tempt the majority of educated urban Muslims away from the Muslim League.The Muslims had arrived in India as conquerors. They saw their religion as infinitely superior to that of the idol-worshipping Hindus and Buddhists. The bulk of Indian Muslims were nonetheless converts: some forced and ...”

“... scorned such condescension and let the congregation make of it what they could but he forbore to mark his card on the point. Still, he would have preferred it if the great rolling cadences of the Authorised Version hadn’t been followed by a saxophone rendition of the Dusty Springfield standard, ‘You don’t have to say you love me’, a number (and there ...”