“... looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have used the 1832 miniature by William Thomson of a 22-year-old Gaskell, or perhaps Richmond’s 1851 drawing (there isn’t as much difference between them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took ...”

“... of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his ...”

“... what Europe chose to bestow. Scottish steamships, German artillery, cotton goods from Lille or Manchester, French electrical engineering, cognac, whisky and the White Fathers. We know all that. But what strikes me, when it comes to the export of institutions rather than hardware and colonists, is the slight but pervasive sense of the inappropriate. To ...”

“... one senses the pleasure of writing books and composing copy (Nevinson for the Daily Chronicle and Manchester Guardian, Davidson for the Times, the Economist, the Daily Herald and the Mirror). In 1904, at the suggestion of Harper’s Monthly, Nevinson embarked on a journey to Angola and São Tome, where he investigated the persistence of slave labour. He ...”

“... not see me,’ she said, ‘they just lay their eyes on me.’ In Reno in the summer of 1960, the Manchester Guardian journalist Bill Weatherby found himself Monroe’s confidant. He couldn’t quite understand why, but thought it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started ...”

“... Motor Corporation’s new Mini. They were married in 1957 and Jill moved into his medical digs in Manchester, where the wallpaper had a bone motif. Keen to avoid the communal dining-room, with its clientele of fusty bachelor surgeons, she tried the kitchenette. ‘I went in and opened the first cupboard,’ she said. ‘I was literally showered with old bones ...”

“... the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised ...”

“... children, were elaborate cakes and the latest iPhone.She was fond of a quote she’d found from William Golding. ‘I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,’ it said. ‘They are far superior and always have been.’ Most of the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became ...”