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“... ladylike manners . . . Elizabeth’s heroines were all perfect beauties. Rubinstein’s women were urban, edgy, glamorous, while Arden’s classic beauties were more like women who had inherited great wealth and spent time on country estates and vacationed at the watering holes of the upper classes . . . Elizabeth remained convinced that her ‘ladies’ spent ...”

“... proportion of white male Republican voters typically reaches landslide proportions, as it did for George W. Bush. Before Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone to the White House. Losing its ...”

“... of nationalists, who voted out, and business interests, who voted in; Labour is a coalition of urban liberals, who voted in, and the working class, who voted out. This means that if a general election were held tomorrow on the single issue of the referendum, the voter wouldn’t know whom to vote for. It wouldn’t be at all clear which faction in either ...”

“... struggle – with a lot of criminal activity under the rubric – by implying that the masses in urban South Africa were led astray by clever cosmopolitans with a scheming, internationalist agenda. During the 1950s and 1960s, race reactionaries in the US denounced white activism in the Civil Rights movement on similar grounds. Johnson didn’t like the way ...”

“... cancelled at the last minute. Oral biography is more familiar in the US than it is in Britain: George Plimpton and Studs Terkel were two of its best-known exponents. In these books, the life of, say, Truman Capote, is told through the words of those who knew him: the author is editor and orchestrator. Lockhart’s Life of Scott is similar: much of the book ...”

“... of a previous age, transferred into night-lit industrial landscapes. A pastoral rendition of the urban, or an urbanisation of the pastoral. Snug journeys in automobile and train, the passing scenery lit by the dying rays of modernist romanticism, as per Baudelaire’s ‘dandyism’: a setting sun, singularly striking, but lacking heat or warmth and ‘full ...”

“... factory smoke – all those fetid conglomerations that seemed to merge with the violence of urban life – couldn’t be prevented from snuffing out the vulnerable. Dickens had brooded over it thirty years earlier but the London fog reached its peak in the 1880s. Health resorts and watering places, with their ‘curative’ sea air and salt ...”

“... 94 mph.As the decades pass and the council homes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s grow into the urban landscape, as their brick and concrete weathers, as they benefit from comparison with the mean little boxes being built by private housebuilders, as a mix of new management, new investment and funds from the last Labour government have dealt with some of ...”

“... idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz)’ who represented ‘urban malaise, second-generation complaint, Talmudic dazzle [and] woeful alienation’.Schwartz’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’ appeared in Partisan Review in January 1938. It opens with an image of a garden in St Petersburg, where the ...”

“... scholarship about Muslim contributions to Western science, most recently summarised in George Saliba’s Islam and the Making of the European Renaissance. He prefers the hoary prejudice that Muslim clerics began to shut down rational thought in their societies at the end of the 11th century. He brusquely dismisses Kenneth Pomeranz’s path-breaking ...”

“... my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it ...”

“... movement known as the Hyde Park Diggers was beginning to size up the countryside after a phase of urban squatting, and now imagined sanctuaries of rustic dissidence: free food, free love, free thinking, home-grown marijuana. Like Fourier’s phalansteries, they were going to nudge society organically towards a revolution that would take it beyond war, sexual ...”

“... Similarly, allegorical or other references to the end of time link writers and works as diverse as George Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), Henri Barbusse (Under Fire) and Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind). They all, Winter argues, ‘turned back to the ancient tradition of apocalyptic drama’. Even the English war poets, usually Exhibit A for Hynes and ...”

“... of the faculty were in favour of James Peacock, who had written a thesis on ludruk, the popular urban theatre of East Java, which he characteristically called Rites of Modernisation, and which was published with the same title. This Parsonian title did not help his cause with the students, for whom ‘modernisation’ was an abandoned fetish. They voted ...”

“... no knowledge of Argentina: he thinks it is an ‘agrarian feudalistic society’ with a ‘small urban middle class’. Dr Goebel, he speculates, was an anti-colonialist from the ‘vociferous’ Yale Law School, which gave him the ‘subconscious motive’ for writing on this subject. Perhaps, but the single-minded grind looks more like the eternal PhD ...”