To appreciate Los Angeles, Banham explained, you will have to forget about comparisons with other cities and think again about the meaning of the word "civilised".The bits from Banham's book that I remember, and occasionally quote to bemused friends, have nothing to do with architecture in the conventional sense.
The prison camp – or gulag – has long occupied an important position in the Russian imagination for dissident writers, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who believed imprisonment could be a transformative experience despite its basic inhumanity, to Varlam Shalamov, who felt that nothing civilised could come from incarceration.
There is an unreasoning anti-London temper in leftwing politics today, so it is salutary to remember how much that is fundamental to our notions of good behaviour, respect, neighbourliness and civilised values come from the political leadership of the capital in the early 1980s.
So for the moment, Thames Clippers' civilised catamarans to and from Waterloo, like Thames Executive Charters' daily commuter boat from Putney, with coffee and newspapers and a sundeck for the summer, remain a secret pleasure for the cognoscenti.
By and large, the comments online are civilised, informed, offer viewpoints from all angles, and, well, good fun.
When children aren't treated in a civilised manner, they cannot learn to be civilised themselves.
Turkish life, the officials say, has civilised the refugees.Yet the fighting is never far from people's minds.
In Shropshire at Wenlock Books, meanwhile, there'll be more prosecco, music from a local musician and a "very civilised" afternoon tea.
And it has undergone a rapid shift from being an insider's world of seating plans and civilised four-month lead times into being a consumer-facing Disneyworld of clothes which are on sale as well as on show, in full-sized funfairs (Tommy Hilfiger) and pop-up sweet stores (Alexander Wang).
At the same time I kept the whole thing secret from my pharma project colleagues because it didn't seem civilised.
