“... about Saltley. Reggie Maudling had begun the meeting by assuring them that the Chief Constable of Birmingham was ready and able to keep the works open: half-way through came the bad news that the Police had been overrun and had withdrawn. A government which knew already that it was short of fuel to start the power stations lost its nerve and turned once more ...”

“... than they do to the UK’s highest courts in London. Similar feelings were also expressed in Birmingham and other parts of England. Contrary to what we were being told by some of our colleagues as we met in the House of Lords, it seemed that the sense of lack of ‘ownership’ of the Human Rights Act was neither widespread nor deep. Our first public ...”

“... method. He had directed British scientists not to tell the Americans about calculations done in Birmingham early in 1940 by the émigré physicists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, which established that no more than a kilogram of fissionable U-235 was required for a bomb. American scientists, like the Germans, who also believed that tons might be ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”

“... in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker prize and new ...”

“... housing schemes. In big cities, the proportion of public land varied between 33 per cent in Birmingham and 65 per cent in Manchester. As Christophers writes, ‘British urban space literally became, in considerable measure, public space, inasmuch as its ownership lay substantially with the state,’ and in some places the same was true of the ...”

“... Road, Blackwall Tunnel. The site which has been nominated, after outflanking a rival proposal from Birmingham, as fitting turf for the New Millennium Experience, was once the resting place for the carpet-wrapped cadaver of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. This sinister wasteland, first left out of the tunnel, marked the limits of Lambrianou’s imagination. And the ...”

“... faced with evidence of the dangers of US blood products, Labour’s minister of state for health, David Owen, had told the House of Commons that he was funding an effort to make Britain self-sufficient in blood products by 1977. But he was given a new brief in 1976. The Labour government dropped the commitment to self-sufficiency soon after, apparently for ...”

“... In her book Estates (2007) Lynsey Hanley, who was brought up on a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, mocks architectural critics who describe various notorious London council tower blocks as inspiring ‘a delicate sense of terror’ or ‘incredibly muscular, masculine, abstract structures, with no concession to an architecture of ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... with satisfaction the progress that has been made. They suggest an itinerary. Day 1: starting in Birmingham, ‘you will be enchanted by old and new exhibits that tell the story of a people and a movement.’ Day 2: ‘travel to Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the civil rights march began in 1965 and where law enforcement personnel confronted ...”

“... tour that swept her from a lunchtime engagement at Hatchards in Piccadilly to an evening spot in Birmingham, and then, on successive days, a progress through Manchester, Norwich, Cambridge, Chester. With her usual good humour, she pitched product, defacing virgin title pages with her neat holograph signature. Punters, publishing flotsam in red suits, local ...”

“... Since his constituency was due to disappear in a boundary change, he found himself a safe seat at Birmingham Stechford, which he represented from 1950 until he went to Brussels as president of the European Commission in 1976. As Campbell rightly notes, MPs during Jenkins’s long first spell on the opposition benches (1951-64) enjoyed a considerable degree of ...”

“... of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was ...”

“... counterpart to the Kennedys’ overseas imperial bluster. After the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the death of four small girls, JFK temporised like mad in the face of racism and intimidation. In a meeting with Birmingham’s white leadership he denounced the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating ...”