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“... in a matter of weeks, and reconstruction provided work at good wages to a large segment of the urban population. When working men had spending money, street trades like prostitution and fast food profited too. Although Japan’s disaster-prone capital lies on a major faultline and tremors are frequent, fire was by far the more common source of destruction ...”

“... political conditions, though the Greens still suffer under first past the post in progressive urban centres such as Lambeth, where their voters are under-represented. Had a right-wing populist party achieved something similar – sitting Ukip councillors were effectively obliterated in this election – the British press would have discovered in the ...”

“... rather than fully conceived towns, many of these ‘grands ensembles’ had little by way of an urban centre, leaving their inhabitants dependent on Paris for nearly everything. ‘I’ve lived in the “ville nouvelle” for twelve years and I don’t know what it looks like,’ Annie Ernaux writes in Journal de dehors of Cergy-Pontoise. ‘I can’t ...”

“... alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house, of course. You could get into the vicarage garden via a side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The ...”

“... the personal touch by way of printing techniques is one way of suggesting the anonymity of modern urban life, of getting that gritty feeling into the paintings. Around 1995, however, a new element appeared in Wool’s work that seemed to reel back on the doctrine of impersonality: spray-gun painted loops whirled onto the painting surface. They could be seen ...”

“... Jacques’s version is only a little less absurd than Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard, a fellow seer of the Demos think tank Jacques helped to found. But there is another side to When China Rules the World at odds with its generally upbeat story. Internationally, China has ‘embraced multilateralism’, attracts its neighbours and ...”

“... shows of Georgian London included transparencies painted on canvas and backlit with oil lamps to mark notable public occasions. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 saw a display outside the French ambassador’s residence where the figures of France and England stood united between the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Concord’. Unfortunately, some sailors in the crowd ...”

“... illegitimate daughter of Bernarbò Visconti; to the title of gonfalonier of the Church, for Urban VI; and to the office of captain general for the proud republic of Florence, whose grateful citizens honoured him with a state funeral. The story that Stonor Saunders traces is a truly remarkable one. John Hawkwood was born the younger son of Gilbert ...”

“... either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on London. Well, not ...”

“... 18th-century houses in Kensington Square. The market gardens and nurseries which surrounded this urban housing disappeared rather slowly, as land to the south of Kensington High Street was developed. The modest scale of the brick houses of Kensington Square, the neat brick and stucco of Edwardes Square (1811-25) and the Italian-villa-like elevations of ...”

“... has the NKVD co-ordinators of mass murder holding a public celebration in the Bolshoi Theatre to mark the twentieth anniversary of their organisation in December 1937. The grotesquerie is unavoidable. Schlögel’s task is to describe one of the most notoriously violent peacetime societies in modern history at its most notoriously violent moment. The period ...”

“... of citizens. The polis walls serve an obvious defensive and protective purpose, but they also mark the frontier between citizens and enemies, the threshold between politics and the wild. Criminals had made themselves enemies of the state, so the Athenians cast their remains out of the city after execution, just as Londoners took the corpses of provincials ...”

“... Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think that they have all the things they have because they deserve them. As for the Downers, it’s hard ...”

“... exhibition catalogue, Charles Harrison describes one kind of artistic inhibition with reference to Mark Rothko. In 1958 Rothko explained that although he belonged ‘to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure’, and although it was something he studied, he found ‘with the utmost reluctance’ that it did not meet his needs. ‘Whoever used ...”

“... in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It ...”