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“... and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded it. This proposal took off from an idea of Hugh Kenner’s, and any theory with two such exceptionally able sponsors needs treating with respect. The element of likelihood in this one derives from the way it locates Eliot’s work within that ‘Age of Criticism’ which Modernism helped to inaugurate. A ...”

“... the mystic heptagon upon the map. This is a church dedicated to the classic small-boy victim, Hugh of Lincoln, to be built among the alleys and foul closes of Moorfields. Here the detective comes at the climax of the story, as victim or as murderer. The older world is rendered with total conviction and an unflagging sense of period. Ackroyd is able to do ...”

“... told ArabLit that the experience reminded him of parkour, an activity ‘often practised in urban places that smell of piss and fast-food and where you need to watch out you don’t step on broken glass or used condoms’. He pointed to one scene in particular, in which a workshop owner repeatedly rapes his young, male employees. The scene ends with the ...”

“... New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty quays full of ‘hard nostalgia’. And ...”

“... Protestant students prefer to rent accommodation further south in Stranmillis. In Belfast the urban motorway – something that has done much to blight city life across the United Kingdom – has a sinister, though not altogether unhappy significance. As Dominic Bryan argues in his lively essay in Belfast 400, the M2 and the Westlink have served as a ...”

“... the five-shilling ceiling on the cost of meals eaten out and the five-inch limit recommended by Hugh Gaitskell on the height of water in a bath, the recipes giving 17 ways of cooking potatoes and the advertisements praising Mrs Sew-and-Sew and Mrs Make-Do-and-Mend, the problem of whether to spend your weekly ration points on one tin of Spam or six of baked ...”

“... terrifyingly personified in Napoleon Bonaparte, and that Britain was still far from being a mainly urban and industrial country. What is more surprising is to find the same enthusiasm for volunteering half a century later, when Britain had become ‘the workshop of the world’ and the supposedly pacific attitudes of its burgeoning middle classes held much ...”

“... while giving them a taste of disrespectful oratory, and second to introduce Germany’s hopelessly urban intellectuals to their own country, their own compatriots. We did a Grassian bus party in 1997, raising the wind for the referendum that would bring back a Scottish Parliament. Two differences from Germany: we made use of the Scottish fondness for music and ...”

“... idea that Richard was sincere in his concessions to the rebels and reluctant to withdraw them. Sir Hugh Segrave, Richard’s new treasurer, told the parliament of November 1381 that the concessions had been made under duress and the king had revoked them as soon as he could: And now the king wishes to know the will of you, my lords, prelates, lords and commons ...”

“... in The North Ship.’ Just as ‘Larkin, the mature poet, was later to transfigure the clichés of urban folklore and advertising in poems such as “Essential Beauty” or “Sunny Prestatyn”’ so he turns ‘well-worn schoolgirl clichés into moving elegies (“Now the ponies all are dead”)’ and ‘the intimate domestic triviality of the schoolgirl ...”

“... despite a ban on strikes decreed last year by President Mugabe, in the wake of a second round of urban riots caused first by food and then by fuel price hikes, themselves the result of a 60 per cent devaluation of the Zim dollar (which, having started life at two to the US dollar, is now 67 to the US dollar). Mugabe wasn’t bothered by the council ...”

“... remained obscure right up to his death. The man who wrote the preface to the first volume of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, and also told the Commons in 1932 – much to his own party’s embarrassment – that if the Scots wanted home rule they should have it, fits into no Clubland category. If Buchan’s identity was veiled in the Sixties, ‘Our ...”

“... blend with those of the past. The result is piquant. It is odd to think of Geoffrey Elton, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lewis Namier as one thinks of Edward Freeman, Samuel Gardner and Edward Gibbon, humanised and distanced at the same time. Vanity and virtue, foolishness and brilliance rub shoulders. One imagines one has heard it all before, but the ...”

“... of London’ where concrete architecture represented everything which was frightening and other: urban motorways, stinking, rowdy and flanked by decaying buildings; reeking underpasses seemed to have been expressly kinked to maximise the number of corners round which imaginary psychopaths could cluster; vast impersonal office buildings giving no indication ...”

“... activities of the poet and natural theologian, was slowly made to seem quaint and unmethodical as urban bodies of collaborative researchers gave their disciplined professional lives to the extension of detailed systems of knowledge. Even Darwin, who drew from the traditions of both the amateur and the specialist, wrote for circles of experts. The decline in ...”