“... was the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), founded in 1933 largely at the prompting of William Beveridge, then director of the London School of Economics. It was renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) in 1936, and today – its services are needed as much now as they ever were in certain parts of the world – it is ...”

“... Williams delighted in the circumstantial evidence that helped make this case. James Cropper of Manchester exemplified the compromised. He was an avid abolitionist who just happened to have massive investments in East India sugar, which was just then coming into competition with slave-produced sugar from the British Caribbean. Cropper wasn’t alone among ...”

“... flying in for a workshop on the manuscript and colleagues at Virginia, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Manchester and Harvard for comments on talks. She thanks the peer reviewers for Princeton University Press (among them Baughan) and the editors and indexers who saw it into print. Sasson has recently taken up a job at Oxford. We all need conversation, and ...”

“... son, or a future he might have determined for himself: a cross between St Sebastian and one of the Manchester Martyrs, he would sacrifice himself for love and expose the hypocrisy of ‘the Britisher’ all at the same time. In this way, Wilde could be read as a literary creation, ‘something sensational to read in the train’. Yeats wrote that he ‘never ...”

“... he had been drinking heavily that weekend. At 51 Western Road, a bathing machine proprietor called William Birkin overheard some of the row on Easter Sunday. He heard Bill shout: ‘You bloody rotten cow – You rotten bugger.’ The couple were using ‘the filthiest language I had ever heard’, Birkin said. The next day he saw Rose Gooding with her eye ...”

“... care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those Leckford Road days, I can turn up a letter that William Jefferson Clinton wrote, on 3 December 1969, to a certain Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas Reserve Officers Training Corps. Clinton wanted to clarify his attitude to the military draft:Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years ...”

“... at Southmead had been left on trolleys in corridors for more than 12 hours. In January, with Manchester’s three emergency hospitals close to full, one patient had to wait more than 16 hours to be admitted. An A&E consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, Dr Richard Fawcett, broadcast his frustration on Twitter. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he ...”

“... the American experience of comprehensive mass education. He moved from Hull to a professorship at Manchester, put away his CND badge, and in 1969 Critical Quarterly published the first of a series of Black Papers attacking the Labour Government’s educational policies. Shepherded by Rhodes Boyson, Cox began to meet the future intellectual leaders of the ...”

“... creations’. Lovelock was born in 1919. At first he trained as a chemist, at the University of Manchester, but has since roved through several scientific fields. He briefly held an academic post at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, and has had other spells in large institutions, but for most of his career he has worked as an independent scientist and ...”

“... until it reaches the present, and then stops. Ballard’s father ran the Chinese division of the Manchester-based Calico Printers Association. The family lived in a large Western-style detached house in the International Settlement, with a bathroom for every bedroom and ten servants. James and Edna’s social life seems to have consisted of the grim expat ...”

“... was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade him. If some ...”

“... clouds in Palmer’s luminously bright cloud pictures (there is one in the Ashmolean, another in Manchester City Art Gallery) are anything but airy and breezy. The Magic Apple Tree struck Herbert as beautiful and peculiar in equal measure: ‘bright crimson apples so numerous and so enormous as far to surpass the utmost stretch of possibility’ – ‘a ...”

“... who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes ...”

“... simply the promotion of working-class interests by every possible means. He told the Chartist William Lovett: ‘I would neither stir hand nor foot to promote any public matter whatever which did not tend to their advantage.’ He expressed the emotional roots of this attitude in a letter to Samuel Rogers, in three sentences with a stirring cadence such ...”

“... the wireless, as it then was. Before the war, the medium was developing a political potential. In Manchester in the Thirties, the left-wing Archie Harding urged that ‘all people should be encouraged to air their views, not merely their professional spokesmen ... The air at least should be open to all, as the Press quite obviously was ...”