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“... the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator hung the Foreign Secretary’s service on the Hoylake Urban District Council round his neck. But Lloyd was no Pooterish aspirant, with absurd social pretensions, to the inner circle of Tory grandees. Knowing well enough that Macmillan referred to him as ‘a middle-class lawyer from Liverpool’, Lloyd planned ...”

“... his 18th-century studies. Most central of all was the search for security and identity. Here, like George III, Namier was the mollusc in search of his rock. Just as his parents had rejected their Judaism, so Lewis rejected their Christianity. Just as his father had disinherited him of Koszylowce, the family estate, so he worked ceaselessly for a Jewish ...”

“... to the West Nile and dengue viruses. The co-discoverers of the Zika virus were the pathologist George Dick and the entomologist and epidemiologist Alexander Haddow, who worked together for the Colonial Medical Service at the Yellow Fever Institute in Entebbe. Haddow was a mosquito man. To study their biting habits he used human bait. Dick was a virus ...”

“... The​ June 1962 issue of Country Life included a report on ‘The Urgency of Urban Renewal’. It’s hard to know why the magazine’s editors commissioned such a piece. In any case, readers learned that there were 60,000 ‘slum and unfit houses’ in Manchester, 15,000 in Oldham, 5000 in Rochdale and 80,000 in Liverpool ...”

“... football fitted into the social structure and where it came from. Soccer in its modern form is an urban game. It was also, initially, an English game. Prints survive of youths chasing footballs in Smithfield in the 12th century; not long afterwards, Shrove Tuesday ‘mob football’ began at Derby, the source of the modern game (hence the ‘local ...”

“... of Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez) and then under Manuel Noriega (former friend of George Bush), is now firmly back in its control. (As John Major says in the Cambridge History, the Panama Canal has been the ‘outstanding symbol of Washington’s power to dominate the weaker states of the hemisphere’.) It still exercises direct colonial rule ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be ...”

“... papers, gossip with porters, rumours peddled by station casuals. Railway lines out of the grander urban cathedrals – Victoria, Waterloo – seem to connect directly with apocalyptic killing fields. They trench through heavy clay to emerge in the shock of battle. The city shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize ...”

“... the girl sleeping off a hangover out of something thicker and more oppressive than air. While George Bellows’s 1924 picture of a boxing match is lively, populist documentary, Carlo Carrà’s Leaving the Theatre of 1909 already gives a radical account of appearance: feathery marks are woven into bright cocoons of colour which allow you to sustain for ...”

“... School’ to arrive in the city just as this cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert ...”

“... being unaware of this possibility, because it hadn’t happened since 1888. But twenty years ago George W. Bush squeaked into office with a five vote majority in the electoral college even though Al Gore outpolled him by half a million votes. Then in 2016 Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump but still lost by a ...”

“... Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600-1770, published in 2007, explored the noisome detritus of urban life (‘not for the squeamish’, as her publishers warned); Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours (2012) was an enjoyable account of the ways in which those who share space can destroy the peace (piano practice, noisy pets, giant leylandii) or build ...”

“... parklands under the safeguard of the Forestry Commission, the decree neatly epitomises the way urban societies have come to think of woodlands (and of wilderness more generally) as zones of quiet retreat that stand in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking ...”

“... in Bootle that had been acquired by Pierhead Housing Association last October. This particular ‘urban regeneration’ project, Pierhead’s press officer told me, involved knocking down five commercial units, each with two storeys of flats above, and replacing them with five commercial units, each with two storeys of flats above. The project cost £1 ...”