“... by their university presses. But the contributors to the Joyce festschrift (Joyce taught at Manchester) teach at a wide range of institutions, and the book is part of a series co-edited by Vernon for the University of California Press. It has, therefore, to pay its way. Many of its attributes – thematic coherence, low production values, a title ...”

“... to take day-trips to Hampton Court or Cobham Hall and for the inhabitants of Birmingham and Manchester to visit such show houses as Eaton Hall, Alton Towers, Chatsworth, Hardwick, Haddon, Belvoir and Warwick Castle. Country-house tourism thrived in the mid-19th century, and in the 1860s it was comparatively rare for a house to be absolutely ...”

“... there are easy political cures for social ills. ‘For many years,’ he wrote in a letter to the Manchester solicitor Edward Herford in January 1850, especially for the last three or four, the question of Pauperism has haunted me as the most alarming of all Social Questions: indeed it is properly the summary and essence of everything that is alarming in ...”

“... were happy. Her daughters Henrietta and Mary conducted well-publicised affairs, Henrietta’s with William Congreve, who left his estate to their illegitimate daughter and named Henrietta’s husband as executor. (The dilemma of the cuckold is eased when his horns are made of gold, as Dr Johnson might have said.) Sarah was mortified when Henrietta appeared at ...”

“... reactions that led to HIV. Though supported by a few prominent professional sympathisers, like Sir William Hamilton, advocates of this theory have experienced great difficulty in getting their work published in respectable medical and scientific journals (Curtis’s piece finally appeared in Rolling Stone). This is the theory Hooper takes up and elaborates in ...”

“... but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set ...”

“... which marginalised his major project in the eyes of his own profession. As his new biographer, William McNeill, candidly declares, ‘a principal purpose of this book is to try to establish a better balance between the popular adulation on the one hand and the professional hostility on the other that closed in on Toynbee after the mid-Fifties, obscuring ...”

“... tirade. With Revolutionary Road, many of his contemporaries – including Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron – felt that he did something comparable for an entire generation; that he saw the cracks in the 1950s. In 1956, William H. Whyte Jr, a Fortune magazine journalist and Max Weber fan, published The Organisation ...”

“... of the Prussian Department of Trade. Beuth had visited Britain before and wrote to Schinkel from Manchester in 1823 that ‘only here ... the machinery and buildings can be found commensurate with the miracles of modern times – they are called factories.’ Beuth was looking for examples in England of What Prussian manufacturing might do – and what it ...”

“... the Tory radical, Carlyle, could not make up his mind one way or the other; the radical populist, William Cobbett, was unequivocally opposed, on the grounds that the new law took away the last property rights of its intended beneficiaries; the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Chartists subsumed poverty in more general considerations about the political and ...”

“... In​ November 1910 a Jewish engineer at Victoria University in Manchester obtained a patent for a new kind of aeronautical propeller. He was just 21, and well on the way to achieving his childhood dream of becoming the greatest aviator since Orville and Wilbur Wright. But he hesitated. He had been reading Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in his spare time, and believed that their inquiries into the foundations of logic heralded a revolution even more exciting than the invention of powered flight ...”

“... a riskiness about it that we don’t associate with the New Criticism. Unless of course we count William Empson as belonging to the school despite himself (he hated its axiomatic claim that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’) since his early criticism ...”

“... R.A. Butler was assailed by the ‘hang ’em flog ’em’ lobby in much the same way as was William Whitelaw twenty years afterwards. In the Fifties there were many who joined Tory outriders like the British Medical Association in complaining about lack of parental control, the leniency of the law and an over-abundance of sex and violence. Teenagers ...”

“... the Frankfurt ghetto and spoke the Western variant of Yiddish known as Judendeutsch. On arrival in Manchester he began to export English cottons and other textiles from his warehouse there to the Continent. Within twenty years, the father and five Rothschild sons had transformed their operations from conventional broking, factoring and merchant capitalism into ...”

“... Eastern Europe, combining his interest in archaeology with service as Balkan correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Investigative journalism, then as now, had its risks, especially in the Balkans. Accused of spying in Herzegovina and unceremoniously banned from the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, he returned to Oxford, where in 1884 he was appointed Keeper ...”