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“... bias, the named writers having birthplaces in Manchester, Norfolk, Inverness, Glossop and Birmingham. It’s true Crace was born in St Albans, but he has lived down the stigma of this perceived advantage by sensibly moving north. One constituent of the literary world that is ignored equally by Books and Lost for Words is the critic. You might think ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... Satan it emerges that the plan is to hold conferences soon afterwards in Leicester, Manchester and Birmingham. One of the brothers stands prominently at the back of the hall holding a mobile phone. It rings very loudly and the speaker breaks off. The man with the phone walks up and down talking intently in Arabic. Then he shakes his head. ‘Well,’ he ...”

“... in manufacturing. They were forced to head for drabber, greyer cities like Bradford, Leicester and Birmingham, whose foundries, steel mills and textile factories offered them ready, if menial employment and where rent and travelling expenses were low. Here in the back-to-back terraced houses in which they lodged, and which they later bought, they ground out ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... unresponsive to the changing patterns of local politics and need. John Stewart, Professor at Birmingham University’s largely ‘self-financing’ Institute of Local Government Studies, may draw rather too neat a picture of ‘the new management of local government’ but his book of this name leaves no doubt that ‘excellence’ can be put to ...”

“... and dress trade had collapsed. Unionised factories had closed. Had they settled in Oldham or Birmingham they would have found working mills and foundries. They would have been able to hunker down, graft, get a mortgage for a two-bedroom terraced house, all the constitutive elements of what used to pass for the Asian good life. Instead, they worked in ...”

“... terrorist attacks, from New York to Lahore, plus two wars that have not gone well, a person in Birmingham seeking a fee-based home loan begins to look like the enemy.Before the surge of Islamic banking, many devout Muslims shied away from banks: for the poorly educated, everything, even a non-interest-bearing current account, came under the general ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... he acts, has already ceded his victim too much power. ‘Honour,’ Lama Abu-Odeh writes, citing David Gilmore, ‘is not only what women must keep intact to remain alive, but what men should defend fiercely so as not to be reduced to women.’ ‘We are men,’ the killers in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers say, ‘but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by ...”

“... George Clinton said on the title track, ‘but that’s a temporary condition, too.’In 1975, David Clarke, a white civil rights lawyer on the city council, introduced a proposal to decriminalise marijuana possession. He pointed out that marijuana arrests had increased by 900 per cent, that 80 per cent of those arrested were black, and that these arrests ...”

“... in 1831, with the help of a steam engine, in a rented four-storey building in a back alley in Birmingham. In the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn ...”

“... to mislead these people: what was on offer was not a ‘humanitarian war’ but an informal Camp David. ‘It needn’t even be the United States,’ he continued. ‘It could be a great man. It could be Nelson Mandela … or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the ...”

“... but started to receive death threats on his mobile phone eight years later. So now he was in Birmingham, and it made sense for Hamraz to join him if he could steal a ride in a lorry and hop the Channel. The West’s exertions on far-off battlefields, shaping a world in its likeness, are among the reasons Europe is the place of choice for thousands of ...”