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“... self-conscious, not sure what they will unwittingly disclose. By the later stages of the show, as David Chandler points out in his catalogue essay, Britain was often just a stopover for those intent on creating an international body of work in which their own style was paramount. Sometimes their subjects are its victims. The American Bruce Gilden manages to ...”

“... for Londoners to take day-trips to Hampton Court or Cobham Hall and for the inhabitants of Birmingham and Manchester to visit such show houses as Eaton Hall, Alton Towers, Chatsworth, Hardwick, Haddon, Belvoir and Warwick Castle. Country-house tourism thrived in the mid-19th century, and in the 1860s it was comparatively rare for a house to be ...”

“... the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort’.By the turn of the century, as David Olusoga explained in The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (2014), Britain had already sorted its Indian subjects into martial races (mostly hardy mountain types from the Punjab and Nepal) and effeminate races (typically people of the plateau and ...”

“... was written a decade earlier. The Great Western was yet to be built; work on the London and Birmingham (the first major railway line out of London) was just beginning; but the Liverpool and Manchester had been completed in 1830, and one of Stephenson’s engines had covered 15 miles in 25 minutes, an average of 36 mph; its normal speed was 20 ...”

“... Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection with Poulson 21 were convicted on corruption charges. There were ...”

“... renationalise the railways if the Tories privatised them, and promised, for instance, that the Birmingham relief road would be built ‘only over my dead body’, now, as Huff and Puff John, presiding over the privatised railways during their most disastrous period since before nationalisation fifty years ago – as well as giving the go-ahead for the ...”

“... political views which greatly interested the new Foreign Minister, Vergennes. He had visited Birmingham in 1775, but saw little future in industry: for him, Britain was a trading power which sucked wealth from its colonies. When the American War of Independence broke out in 1776, he stopped being a minor emissary and began thinking like a statesman. If ...”

“... friend, also a revolutionary socialist, a Sinhalese who worked nights in the Bournville factory in Birmingham and talked about the mental tricks the men used to get through eight hours under tubelights weighing boxes of chocolates and inserting milk-chocolate ‘envelopes’ in every box that was a touch below standard. Some swore continuously, others poured ...”

“... With the media, had been one of Hall’s answers since the 1970s, when he and his students at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies noticed a new word – ‘mugging’ – turning up in the newspapers to denote unexceptional acts of street violence, with unprecedentedly ‘vicious’ criminal sentences for those convicted, especially when ...”

“... Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden) found a slightly earlier epicentre in the Coronation year, 1953. David Lodge’s new novel (How far can you go?) charts Catholic perplexity in the face of the permissive Sixties, Humanae Vitae and the abolition of National Service. Julian Barnes’s very much à la mode Metroland is divided into three sections: I Metroland ...”

“... him for an interview, and natural negotiator that he is, he had matched me by requesting a lift to Birmingham New Street. While I drove him to his train, he spoke skittishly of the politicians with whom he had to treat. The sight of the Cannon cinema on the Hagley Road elicited a lively appreciation of the neglected art of the Western. A short time later, when ...”

“... to live in a mixed couple, something that carried one set of meanings in Kingston, another in Birmingham. Slowly, over time, I tried to absorb what my whiteness signified, both before and after empire. I first visited Jamaica in 1965 to meet Stuart’s family, shortly after we were married. Independence was still new and hopes were high for a better ...”

“... his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic policeman, David Rathband, setting in motion a massive manhunt. You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] is written in the Capote tradition, and Hankinson mentions Gordon Burn in his acknowledgments. The basic strategy of the genre, as Tom Wolfe ...”

“... dance during the day), political clubs and swimming baths – with flooring laid over the pool. Birmingham in the 1930s had 179 venues licensed for public dancing, Newcastle 251 and Glasgow 256, with a total capacity in the city for more than 32,000 people. In 1938 annual admissions to dances stood at around a hundred million. Dancing was a recession-proof ...”

“... in comparison with the OED’s rather minimal notation (a first usage in 1982 and a location in Birmingham). To accept the case put forward in the ‘Chrestomathy’ that ‘giving a damn’ derives from giving a dam (a sum of money in Hindustani) is to open the door to a whole history of contacts and borrowings. The task of the now dominant language ...”