“... and the most intellectually distinguished of all European universities, the home of Duns Scotus, William Ockham and the Mertonian school. Volume III brings us to the Renaissance. We notice immediately the firm direction of the editor, James McConica, who has imposed an order on the writing of the history of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon ...”

“... In August 1950, Berger exhibited his own work under the aegis of the AIA. His subjects, the Manchester Guardian noted, included ‘fishermen, oxyacetylene welders, builders and – shades of Léger – acrobats’. He was now in his early twenties. Educated at private schools, he had studied at the Central School of Art, after which he was drafted into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the 18th and 19th centuries, Pericles sank to the bottom of the sea. ‘Not much to our taste,’ William Hazlitt wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and ‘not like Shakespear’. We tend now to call Pericles a late work but Dryden thought its weaknesses signalled an early play, even a kind of apprentice piece. ‘A slender poet must have time to ...”

“... it was looking as if both of these sources would soon be exhausted. In 1898, the English chemist William Crookes sounded a Malthusian alarm: the world’s population, he said, would very soon outstrip its food supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for white people: ‘The fixation of nitrogen,’ he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”