“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its own hydrogen bombs and jet ...”

“... British men serving overseas. According to Alma LaBadie, speaking at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, the ‘condition of forgiveness’ was often to send the child ‘elsewhere’. Dr Barnardo’s Homes registered as an adoption society in 1947; it was noted that the charity accepted children ‘of dusky skin’ but would struggle to find ...”

“... of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a mother with genteel aspirations. The support of his mother enabled Jack to win a scholarship to Manchester High School and eventually to qualify as a teacher, later moving to leafy Buckinghamshire, where young Roger grew up. But Jack Scruton nursed a vivid sense of the grievances of his class. He was not just Old Labour, he was Paleo-Labour: the country was ...”

“... and SDP founder Roy Jenkins or the Americans Telford Taylor (later a Nuremberg prosecutor) and William Bundy (a Kennedy security adviser). Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask the question, but it would be ...”

“... evolved slowly: the first professor of geriatric medicine wasn’t appointed until 1965 (William Ferguson Anderson at Glasgow). The treatment of geriatric patients was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic ...”

“... announce imminent triumph for parties that then lost elections – most spectacularly in 1945. William Maxwell (‘Max’) Aitken, born in 1879, was a restless son of the manse. His father was a Church of Scotland minister from Torphichen, near Linlithgow, who ended up ‘called’ to a congregation in New Brunswick. Max grew up in a heavily Scottish ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... to them.)The Highland Clearances stood apart from the everyday experience of having relatives in Manchester, Queensland or Vancouver: the evictions and cottage-burnings of the previous century were a long way from the easy matter of boarding a liner west from Greenock or a train south from Glasgow. But in what was still an emigrant country, many people must ...”