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“... 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 ...”

“... wild swine, 1300 hares and 115 cranes. Basic supplies for the feast to mark the installation of George Neville as Archbishop of York in 1467 began with 104 oxen, 1000 sheep, 10,000 capons and six wild bulls, washed down with a hundred barrels of wine. These occasions were meant to demonstrate munificence such as humbler kitchens could not imitate; but ...”

“... him. It was, presumably, some kind of survivor’s trophy. Only tourists are frightened by these urban mad; respectable citizens good-naturedly ignore them as being of no more account than pigeons and as inscrutable as gang graffiti. In New York and Los Angeles (where they parody the consumer-mad host society by heaping their possessions in supermarket ...”

“... of violence. The choice is between the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where they defeated General George Armstrong Custer, and the first Wounded Knee Massacre, when soldiers of Custer’s old regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, mowed down Ghost Dancers with the combination of military efficiency and cultural confusion that characterises American incursions into ...”

“... one thing, its greens and fairways provide the only remaining enclosed parkland in a city where urban blight is an increasing problem. For another, its caddies are young and competitive and hire themselves out on a basis of keen but friendly rivalry. My own selection of Hassan, a lad of no more than twelve summers, proved especially fortunate. After ...”

“... minority. This group, Scotland’s middle-class professionals, already accustomed to urban life and relatively secure, began to take part in Britain’s most ambitious political and cultural schemes. Empire was one; the expansion of the state after World War Two was another. When these came to an end, it was the ‘hurricane survivors’ who bore ...”

“... George Orwell was one of the great self-mythologisers. He sought out extreme experiences, was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of England and among soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war ...”

“... looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and ...”

“... within the Edwardian Liberal Party, in which demagoguery and ‘sectionalism’ were rife. Lloyd George is passed over without so much as a mention. Parry’s interpretation of Victorian politics is put forward with great skill and eloquence, so much so that it seems likely to become a new orthodoxy. Not everyone will be entirely convinced by ...”

“... Parsons, the brickmaker whose wife, Mary, had been fined for accusing Marshfield. In February 1651 George Langton, a carpenter, declined to sell hay to Parsons because he had none to spare. Parsons took this badly and occult revenge was suspected when, some days later, Langton’s wife, Hannah, pulled her bag pudding of offal and oats out of the kettle only to ...”

“... of Hanover in the early 18th century has been extended by historians to encompass the reigns of George IV and William IV. Now Price wishes to stretch the elastic a little further and bring in the Victorians as well. He argues that neither the advent of Parliamentary democracy in 1832 nor the coming of free trade in 1846 saw off the dominant features of the ...”

“... of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of the Civil Rights movement. (That ‘respectable’ and ‘Nixon’ can be included in ...”

“... structures’ and the emergence of the modern nation-state. In the 1630s, as Thomas mentions, George Herbert could write that ‘My friend may spit upon my curious floor’; by the end of the period, it was the spitting rather than the floor that would seem curious. Urination could still be public or semi-public, within limits. In the first decade of the ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”