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“... restaurant in France with her ambitious husband, Paul. She maintains a regular correspondence with George, her English father. When George dies, her sense of loss focuses on an irrational conviction that he must have posted a final letter, a communication that would have made sense of her diminished life. Her coping ...”

“... George Saunders – whose semi-official website carries a reminder that the man who played Addison DeWitt in All about Eve was called George SANDERS – was born in Chicago in 1958. A schoolteacher got him interested in literature, but having been exposed at an impressionable age to the novels of Ayn Rand he ended up studying geophysical engineering: ‘I didn’t want to be one of those life-sucking parasitic artists,’ he recalled last year ...”

“... sort of funny entertainment’. Rock’n’roll as modern vaudeville: I doubt the precious George Michael would agree. On the cover of I was a teenage Sex Pistol Matlock peeps cagily over his shades at you; Bare has George in one of his standard-issue moody pouts. I take it the title connotes the craven exposure of ...”

“... Cri) was opposite, on the other side of Piccadilly Circus. In ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell wrote of their heyday before the First World War in softer tones: ‘crazy millionaires in curly top hats and lavender waistcoats’, champagne parties and slang, ‘chocs and cigs and ripping and topping and heavenly … divvy weekends at Brighton ...”

“... manner that uses unlikely juxtapositions to capture something of the speed and density of urban life: Mahler ripens in the bookstores Upstairs a jet is icing the sky Across Spring Street a man pours ice from a sack Into a bucket, precise as a drumroll Down Sixth three buildings glow like ingots The Morgan darkens, an old tooth Doors of sound on 42nd ...”

“... won’t release the driver’s name, fearing for his safety. We can’t speed up the flow of urban traffic – more roads produce more cars, and congestion soon becomes as bad as it was before. Ian Parker describes in Autopia how a signal engineer got vehicles flowing again at the Hanger Lane gyratory system in London by finding seven ‘spare’ seconds ...”

“... caused by the Highland Clearances. Mel Gibson in Braveheart wears a kilt to play William Wallace. George IV squeezed himself into a kilt and pink tights to visit Edinburgh. Livingstone was supposed to get on well with Africans because of his Highland ancestry. It wasn’t until the 1960s that radicals like Tom Nairn and Murray Grigor began to satirise ‘the ...”

“... say ‘Hawksmoor’ churches. These are Christ Church, Spitalfields; St Anne’s, Limehouse; St George-in-the-East; St Mary Woolnoth; St Alfege’s, Greenwich; and St George’s, Bloomsbury. Here the six murders occur in each era: always a virgin male, as the murderer’s occult creed demands. But there is to be a seventh ...”

“... In wealth, they used to own about 75 per cent of the land of England and Wales, and large areas of urban real estate; today, only a handful of old landed millionaires are left, and every decade they are obliged to sell off more capital assets. For a period of about 350 years this hereditary élite ruled Britain amazingly successfully – with the one exception ...”

“... in the world, yet the one where the yearning for the countryside was the most developed. Its anti-urban bias was shown in the prevalence of parks, the ubiquity of flower gardens, the country holiday industry, the dreams of retirement to a honeysuckle cottage, and the emphasis on rural values in the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements. England was the most ...”

“... but that doesn’t mean it is free from political calculation. As one disgruntled Labour MSP, George Foulkes, complained during the vigorous early days of the SNP’s first government, they are ‘doing it deliberately’. These are state-building manoeuvres, designed to establish the credibility and groundwork for a transition to independence, carried ...”

“... We​ had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the poet’s birthplace. Oppen (b. 1908) had recently broken a long silence and become a poet of his time – the 1960s and 1970s – however much he may have insisted, as he did in the same poem, that he was ‘of the Thirties ...”

“... had a unit superbly suited to the job – the SAS. Tony Geraghty’s account of its shaping as an urban counter-terrorist force does not make edifying reading. In 1941, a subaltern in the Guards, David Stirling, fighting Rommel in the Western Desert, decided that what the campaign needed was guerrilla tactics: small units of highly-trained commandos striking ...”

“... imbecile bureaucracy: the detective is perennially cast as a disaffiliated flâneur, wandering the urban sprawl, collecting pay cheques from the highest bidder. He is latently self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the ...”

“... re-emerge and, after three centuries embedded (or as Balzac puts it, squashed) in the dense urban fabric of the Latin Quarter, find itself an island, only just spared by Baron Haussmann’s interventions to the east and narrowly missed on two sides by the Boulevards Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain. A palimpsest of the history of Paris and of the Roman ...”