“... visceral divide in public opinion which the Jamaica controversy generated. ‘The truth is,’ the Manchester Guardian said ponderously but accurately, ‘that the insurrection of the negroes, and the manner in which it was suppressed, raise a series of questions not merely local, casual or personal, but entering very deeply into the science of politics and ...”

“... Committee in text-lined subterranean labyrinths accessed through a trapdoor in the shelves of the Manchester Deansgate branch of Waterstones. Hooking up with Dr Trey Fidorous, a maker of ‘language viruses’ (‘phrases, words, alternative spellings, abbreviations, corruptions’ that infiltrate the media and promulgate through websites, radio programmes ...”

“... evidence was never secret, being set out in Ransome’s own articles for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian (his early stuff was often reprinted in the New York Times as well), and in his pro-Soviet pamphlets, On Behalf of Russia (1918), Six Weeks in Russia (1919) and The Crisis in Russia (1921), and only half covered up in his autobiography, which ...”

“... bars. In September, the nature of the struggle changed when the home secretary Herbert Gladstone, William Gladstone’s son, ordered a new policy of force-feeding. Women were pinned down while prison doctors rammed long tubes into their nostrils or down their throats. The tubes weren’t always cleaned between feedings, and some women suffered chipped ...”

“... the Reuters board was told that the ANA was subsidised by HMG. The upright Laurence Scott of the Manchester Guardian argued at the board meeting before the contract was signed that the question of serving government-subsidised organisations had arisen before, and ‘the view had always been taken that Reuters was prepared to serve any organisation provided ...”

“... a family of achievers and suicides, he took up the study of engineering, which brought him to Manchester to do research on kites. This led him to more purely mathematical interests, and thence to the foundations of mathematics, when he came across Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. Philosophy surged through him and, at Frege’s suggestion, he went to ...”

“... In the 19th century, many politicians in this country laid confident claim to several languages. William Gladstone, the four-time Liberal prime minister, according to his biographer Roy Jenkins, was convinced that ‘an educated Englishman ought to be able to communicate in all the principal languages of civilised Europe. So he did.’ Gladstone’s ...”

“... being a coalition, about the inevitable moderating influence of power (a liberal view that the Manchester Guardian once took when Hitler became Chancellor) and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s ...”

“... I had taken the same picture under the bust of John Harvard as I had on my last visit. I had seen William James’s house, had imagined Elif Batuman scampering around campus, gathering material for The Idiot. I had refused, out of pure perversion, to see the Glass Flowers, had gone to visit the Chinese jades instead, and Gaston Lachaise’s Woman Bending ...”

“... face of things to be at its most rampant, turns out to be an atypical interlude, when cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool rise on the tide of industrialisation to challenge its manufacturing primacy and develop strong civic élites and cultures of their own. Then history rights itself, geography reasserts itself, and industries come pouring down ...”

“... nominally under Sir Gilbert, but more delicate and more respectful of post-medieval fabric. William Morris’s firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings ...”

“... time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with the old ...”

“... in some way untypical, and here the accounts we have are largely those of the better-off. Lord William Nevill, Lady Constance Lytton, Jabez Balfour and the suffragettes: their views reflect the redoubled degradation felt by prisoners drawn from a better social class. In other words, his overall picture does not compensate sufficiently for the fact that, as ...”

“... awful potency lasted pretty much through the 1980s, powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the ...”

“... Chiarugi on the Continent, but domestic parallels as well, such as the work of John Ferriar at the Manchester Lunatic Asylum in the 1790s, or of Edward Long Fox, from whose Bristol madhouse Tuke recruited Katherine Allen, the Retreat’s first matron. In what ways does Porter claim to go beyond this? First, by widening the circle of those entitled to be known ...”