“... women he knew’; sometimes these were outright proposals, but none came good. There was Lucretia Oldham, the recipient of his early love poems; Fanny Falkner, who accepted a proposal of marriage but changed her mind; Jane Gryffydh, ‘the Caernarvonshire nymph’ of his first tour to Wales, and hot on her heels another unidentified ‘Caernarvonshire ...”

“... Labour MP disagree with that? What they really hated was his questioning of the private sector. John Prescott had been allowed to pledge the renationalisation of the railways at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, but after Blair’s victory the following year the subject was never raised again. Until now. When I asked him when he first realised he might ...”

“... Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his predecessors became known as one of the new terrors of death, and whose Life of Mansfield contains at ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of commending ‘class struggle’ on British lines as good for both progress and stability: what he really stood for, Addison makes clear, was ‘a non-socialist and non-militant labour movement under ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... referred unhappily to his discoveries about Cobbett’s family life. When he was MP for Oldham, there was a terrible quarrel between Cobbett and his wife, with the four sons ranged, at first, two on each side. One of Cobbett’s henchmen, Jesse Oldfield, claimed the family farm and drove out Cobbett’s son, William, who went bankrupt. ‘There is ...”

“... Department officials. It offered ‘balanced’ debates on the issues between far right hawks like John Tower, and moderate hawks like John Mearsheimer, and rigorously excluded the views of anti-war representatives. (CNN’s subsequent release, via Turner Home Entertainment, of videotape ‘highlights’ of its war coverage ...”

“... absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate with good stories.’ And in case you think it’s just a boy thing, Michiko Kakutani, awarded a Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and ...”

“... office cleaner to look after him. They and their three sons lived in a four-room council flat in Oldham. They received £10.25 a week in sickness benefit, £1.05 in supplementary benefit, 90p in family allowances and £2.60 for their rent, paid directly by the Supplementary Benefits Commission to the council. One of their bedroom windows had been ...”

“... mother of six; while, in a survey of attitudes to religion, a divorced working-class woman from Oldham described heaven as ‘similar to life here but no sex’. Kynaston’s carefully researched account of social attitudes in the 1940s and 1950s doesn’t lift the spirits. And it reminds us that, for all the huffing and puffing of conservative commentators ...”

“... best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren did. The idea of ...”