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“... Throughout the Cold War, the British Army poured most of its resources into training and equipping for ‘the big one’, the day the Red Juggernaut would come rumbling across Europe and bring with it the most destructive warfare imaginable. The fact that British soldiers were fighting and dying at various times in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the Falklands was an annoying detail to many senior officers and planners in Whitehall, a distraction from what defence was meant to be about ...”

“... Duff became head of MI5 in 1984 he was keen to reduce the importance of F Branch. As he told Mark Urban, he was supported by the majority of his staff ‘except for a handful of old sweats in middle management’. Duff seems to have been a new force within MI5: one intelligence officer told Urban admiringly that ...”

“... felt the magic of the city, but until recently there has been little real attempt to rationalise urban processes. There have been plenty of topographical, antiquarian and anecdotal accounts: the Victorians were profuse with their ‘Annals’, ‘Memorials’, ‘Reminiscences’, ‘Fragments’. But until different minds, like that of Patrick Geddes, had ...”

“... first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy ...”

“... Undo that step, or at the least tread softly, for a sleek and bushy-tailed urban fox is counting chick- chick-chick- chickens in his dreams; when he wakes he’ll yawn and prowl, while I’ll be staring, shamefaced, down the grainy, haunted vistas opened by insomnia. Sing, birds, I mean all ye bird-brained in every furrow that you hop in; warble tales of the species that will wade through estuaries, and stalk the plains, or tunnel beneath them, after mishap or meteor ...”

“... full April moon Slides above barely visible clouds, and is greeted By a burst of hooting from an urban Tawny owl. On empty Brownfield sites they nest, and rear their young, and feed On vermin. Has Any Probing, saucer-eyed astronomer, even a modern Or French one, ever Grown genuinely accustomed ‘aux profondeurs du grand Vide céleste’? Someone halts, and ...”

“... minaret and mosque, a droning police helicopter banks and circles, banks and circles: unnerved, an urban vixen pokes her elegant muzzle skywards, deliberates, then abandons her scavenging. Chapter and verse yield to the fierce will of commentators, who rebuke us all for invading the distance between soil and words, hunger and clouds. In revenge, the rudiments ...”

“... poem’s London more generally. In a passage from the poem ‘Le Soleil’ that anticipates the urban poetics of another ardently Francophile American poet, Frank O’Hara, Baudelaire figures his traversing of the streets of Paris as an aleatory means of exploring simultaneously the city, the self, and the possibilities of poetry: Flairant dans tous les ...”

“... success of a protest. Considering the period since the end of the Cold War, the social scientist Mark Beissinger noted that ‘urban revolutionary episodes that have engaged in rallies, protests or processions in public space have had a significantly higher rate of success than those which engage in other tactics but do ...”

“... the social relationships (master to servant, husband to wife, family to outsiders) which, as Mark Girouard has shown, were crucial in determining the form of the country house are omitted altogether. Mr O’Neill is not interested in the life of the building after construction is completed, but only in its architectural conception and birth – a ...”

“... Guys, Baudelaire leaves the salon and goes out into the street, away from art criticism to urban digression. He mentions Poe’s story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, whose narrator, recovering from a recent illness, sits in a London café and watches the human traffic through the window. Artists are like convalescents, Baudelaire adds: nervously ...”

“... from prosperous centres of medium or high population density. Prosperity in the newer, informal urban environment – in Caracas or Lagos, say – is reckoned by incomparably different standards. Davis, the urban historian who also excels at apocalyptic geography, sketches the various ways in which its inhabitants can ...”

“... Stone Walls, Grey Skies: A Vision of Yorkshire, Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album, Urban Landscapes. In many of these land and sky take precedence over the built landscape of the photographs of Tice’s native New Jersey. A sense of quietude pervades the images. Although the Midwestern small-town photographs display many of the elements Tice is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A folk memory of industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the love affair with suburbia that replaced it? Howard imagined that the problem of London could be solved only by its extinction ...”