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“... claim their equipment was so bad they couldn’t hear what Curtis was saying, though the drummer, Stephen Morris, still wonders how they missed the desperation. When they recorded Unknown Pleasures in the studio in April 1979, the band must have been able to hear the lyrics more clearly, but they preferred not to think about what lay behind them. Sumner says ...”

“... when the typist was away. My head of chambers could recall Lord Darling, memorably insulted by the Birmingham Daily Argus in 1900, when he lectured the local press on how to report his decisions, as an impudent little man in horsehair who might have made a successful bus conductor, sitting in the 1930s on the judicial committee of the Privy Council and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Diaries,’ a series of volumes scrupulously and learnedly edited by the late Father Charles Stephen Dessain and others. But the imputation is unfair to the best modern biographer of Newman, Meriol Trevor, whose two-volume work (1962-63) also had the advantage of the extensive archives at the Birmingham Oratory, even ...”

“... man, the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-shing? In north-east England, they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, 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 ...”

“... me, by which time my train is in. 25 January. Having spoken at Norwich I trek across England to Birmingham to speak there, never more conscious of Larkin’s strictures about going round the country pretending to be oneself. It’s a beautiful morning, the flat fields made dramatic and Dutch by floods and huge skies, but the whole journey ruined by two ...”

“... his influence that good critical prose is now dismissed as ‘bellelettrism’ (see, for example, Stephen Trombley’s dismally representative approach in his study of Virginia Woolf). For many years, the Cambridge stress on the private spirit – practical criticism is an example – helped to energise the study of literature and most critics would admit to ...”

“... himself. Then came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of this piece – a ...”

“... largely due to the enthusiasms of Englishmen, with Anthony Lewis at the Barber Institute in Birmingham and the devotees of the Handel Opera Society in London providing the chance to see as well as to hear – a necessary test for any kind of opera. It is the miracle of Handel’s operatic genius which has allowed these ventures to succeed. No Farinelli ...”

“... only had a few hours’ sleep. I’m hysterical. Is this what it’s like to be famous? No wonder Stephen Fry tried to escape across the Channel. The woman in charge of the television programme rings up. Would I be prepared to take a phone-in from women suffering from breast cancer? I say I’m not too keen on the idea as I’m not medically qualified and ...”

“... even by allies – of working for his own ends: ‘Some friends think,’ he wrote to the Birmingham merchant Joseph Sturge, ‘that my exertions on this subject are to promote my own interests and on that account I have not given the subject impartial consideration.’ Stephen Lushington, the dashing ...”

“... A bout of dirigisme from the centre having failed in the 1850s, well-governed cities such as Birmingham had briefly savoured near medieval measures of independence from central control, like towns which showed the local time on the clocks before the coming of the railways. The County Councils Bill might have been, Davis says, ‘the last occasion on ...”

“... is the source of Joyce’s title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was ...”

“... to stop a young boy from losing his life. Parallels with the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence will also be made. The Metropolitan Police has learnt from its PR disasters in that case and has proudly announced that the hunt for Damilola Taylor’s killers is the biggest since Jill Dando’s murder. As far as is possible, the Met has ...”

“... for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for the ...”