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“... He is, of course, an immensely prolific writer, who has published one well-regarded monograph on urban landlords, a sheaf of learned articles on cognate aspects of economic history, and a mixed handful of speculative and wide-ranging essays. But he is not chiefly renowned for his own research: instead his reputation is sustained by his literary talents. This ...”

“... and the crucial final chapter is a lament for his decline (librarians will soon need a new shelf-mark for the ‘Things ain’t what they used to be’ section): ‘That an increasing number of young men from Eton and the other major public schools should have done things like photography, interior decoration, or art-dealing in preference to the traditional ...”

“... landscape; his ‘holidays in reality’ were valued for the temporary relief they offered from urban loneliness and the discomforts of noisy, dingy lodging-houses and the daily grind of the law. The longing for exercise outdoors is felt particularly keenly after Stevens begins spending months at a time travelling the country on business, and by the ...”

“... History of Scotland might seem to be ones of political significance primarily, but 1832 and 1914 mark very nearly the span of the domination of heavy industry in Scotland, the special concentration of population and skill on the Clyde, and the social developments that came from the labour requirements of coal, iron and, eventually, shipbuilding. The ...”

“... on advertising and money and the silver screen and the various types who feature in his album of urban living, it reveals him as an astute and eloquent observer of the ways in which culture and institutions shape the individual, while fostering an illusion of autonomy and choice. He was only occasionally a topical political poet – most notably in the ...”

“... bête noire of traditionalists, has existed since at least the 1840s, though as recently as 1979 Mark Strand was denied a Pulitzer Prize because his collection The Monument was made up of prose poems. These days it often appears, in anglophone poetry at least, as one option among many: free verse, formal verse, prose poetry, erasure poetry, whatever ...”

“... as a source of street lighting, can still be imagined by determined sentimentalists. The urban stroller finds it hard to resist a detour (this after all is what urban strolling is all about, inventing excuses for getting lost), a quick scan of Shoreditch Town Hall in its latest incarnation. It is no longer a public ...”

“... institution. A state supreme court decision on 3 July in favour of the legislature had seemed to mark the end of local misrule. But the riot that occurred late in the afternoon of the following day, resulting in 12 deaths and at least 37 injuries, shed light on the violent groups that peppered working-class communities and provided the foot soldiers for New ...”

“... writing obituaries of Indian democracy, the latest such occasion being the assassination of Rajiv. Mark Tully, the BBC’s man in India, is completely different from his peers. For one thing, he has been there for a long, long time: he came out in 1972 and has stayed on, except for a short while when the Indian Government asked him to leave during the ...”

“... party, with a distinctively social democratic philosophy, not what was later to be termed a Mark II Labour Party. Callaghanite Labourism, with its corporatist kow-towing to the Unions and its Tammany Hall approach to political leadership, was, if anything, even less attractive to us than Bennite neo-Marxism. But even we had not quite emancipated ...”

“... between commoner and landowner, nomad and settler, noise and tranquillity, the rural and the urban. Party Lines begins with an account of the subcultures that faced harassment from police and local authorities in the 1970s and 1980s: hippie free festivals, Jamaican sound systems, the New Travellers. Gillett maps the political vectors of dance music from ...”

“... corridors of the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, trying to keep up with him and Ben Brown and Mark Urban from the BBC, who have longer legs than me. I remember him being very interested in television and not very interested in newspapers. Richard speaks well of him, though. Paul and I consolidate our cars. Now we have just one between us, a red ...”

“... historical and technological conditions: in his foreword to The White Goddess he deplores ‘urban civilisation’ and scorns those writers still trapped in ‘the industrial machine’. ‘I do not even know,’ he loftily concludes, ‘that you are serious in your poetic profession.’ It is Graves himself who ends up seeming quaint and ...”

“... of rhyme, but the poem’s irregular line lengths, its open-endedness, its semi-surreal urban imagery, its lack of all punctuation, exhibit a determination to be ‘absolument moderne’, as Arthur Rimbaud had thought all poets must be some forty years earlier. Beckett translated the poem’s visceral, if enigmatic, last line, ‘Soleil cou ...”

“... has called ‘exposition’. ‘Exposition’ here refers to a physical and social world: the new urban landscape of grands boulevards, great exhibitions, department stores, along with the hinterland of empire from which so many of its commodified exhibits came. It is the universe massively investigated by Walter Benjamin as the origin of what was later to be ...”