urbane

Most of the characters here are criminals, ranging from the semicomical, relatively harmless Williams to the deceptively urbane Moten to the merely thuggish — though there is some attempt to delineate the worse and less worse among the robbers, and in some cases even engage one’s sympathy.

In the secular realm, Douglas Blow posits in “On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy” that a similar desire took hold over urbane Italians reduced to impotence in the face of repeated invasions and occupations by foreign powers like France and Spain from 1494 onwards.

Being seen at a café here is considered hip and urbane, and that has helped drive young customers through the doors.

An urbane technocrat from a well-heeled Jewish family, whose maternal grandparents fled the Holocaust, she cuts a very different figure to Amlo.

“Nowadays there are more urbane people living in the Piedmont. Nobody’s coming out of the hills doing any of those big, back-throated things.”