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“... of the horse as a working animal was coming to an end. The disappearance of the horse from urban –and later rural – life didn’t happen overnight. Horses and donkeys were still found in great numbers in British towns and cities until just after the Second World War, when the shift to motorised transportation of goods caused the collapse of the ...”

“... University: he never graduated, because the family money ran out, but he had already made his mark in the literary world. Childhood Years is a most attractive introduction to Tanizaki for those who have never read his fiction: it ought to lead on quite naturally to Some prefer nettles and The Makioka Sisters. By the time he wrote the book he had achieved ...”

“... the hills and the shore, have begun creeping up the mountainside to form an almost vertical urban panorama. The rains have usually finished by the end of November, so when heavy storms struck this coastal area on 15 December last year they were assumed to be the last fling of the rainy season. Despite the regularity of tropical storms and wayward ...”

“... uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds ... What you have to remember is that art today has become one of the performing arts. Art galleries are places where you go in search of a certain kind of kinky experience. Today’s art gallery is a cross between a church and a disco ... Koons and ...”

“... the kind of country school people campaign to keep open because it’s gentler than the bigger urban versions, and the kids get more individual attention. Astonishing, to me, to go back and eavesdrop on these well-behaved children who wear uniforms, talk trustingly with their teachers, and have even produced a booklet which tells me that the school was ...”

“... Perhaps the same was true of the Westernising intellectuals.The Great Purges of the late 1930s mark a shift in both Clark’s book and David-Fox’s. Many of the Stalinist Westernisers (including Koltsov, Tretiakov and Arosev) were killed, along with Comintern functionaries, German literary exiles and many other resident foreigners. Litvinov ...”

“... rich and poor in both town and country, as well as widening the gap in living standards between urban and rural populations. The reason is that the growth has been mainly in information technology, manufacturing and the service sector, which doesn’t help the 65 per cent of the population that still live in the countryside. The increase in manufacturing ...”

“... about Rembrandt’s conception of picture-making is that its status was open to question. For the urban groups who leant towards cabalism – a quietist position offering inward resistance to the era’s religious hegemonies – painting possessed no firmly located value. It replicated the surfaces of the world, but it did not directly give onto the world’s ...”

“... in stages from hunter-gatherers to pastoral farmers, to arable farmers and then to commercial, urban-dwelling traders. The West Indians bastardised this theory by claiming that enslavement to Caribbean planters was an engine of improvement: were not enslaved Africans being taught arable cultivation by European traders? Yet when these same West Indians ...”

“... Crace is like an outing with one of Wim Wenders’s angels, or at least an evening class with an urban shaman, an education in the stuff of life: a beginner’s guide to earth, fire, air and water. You can learn from him not only how to test fruit, but also how to boil eggs without a pan, how to slaughter a cow, and how to slake your thirst sucking ...”

“... the wards of the Barrack Hospital at Scutari at night? Yes – but with what to light her way? Mark Bostridge is no revisionist, but he does point out that the evidence from the 1850s has little or nothing to say about the lamp. Nightingale’s path was enormously eased by her circumstances. Her family was wealthy. Her father educated her broadly and ...”

“... in his saying he is a master in (‘maître en’) such things rather than of them, which Mark Polizzotti catches well with his ‘I am a master at phantasmagoria.’Do boats talk about how they feel when their haulers have been killed and their crews have vanished, leaving them to float down rivers to the sea and an unimaginable freedom? Do they say ...”

“... stitch up the revolution, reverse its achievements and plunge them into poverty and helplessness. Urban middle-class residents winced when uncouth figures poured in through the city gates, now abandoned by their military guards. They feared for their property, and sometimes for their lives. In Palermo, there was a rough, diverse and potentially ungovernable ...”

“... history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: ‘There are new voices speaking from the depths and fullness of the Negro’s life, and they are harbingers of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key ...”

“... knife, the seven sheriffs discharged a volley of 29 rounds at her, 18 of which found their mark. Davis ends with a long chapter on Fontana, his birthplace, a town just off Interstate 10 and rarely visited by the genteel classes who whizz by on the way to Palm Springs with their windows rolled up. Fontana embodies a trio, a triage too, of dreams which ...”