“... 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 ...”

“... Democracy, as the editor of Tribune in the mid-1980s, and notably in the campaign to quash the Birmingham Six’s convictions. As he comments here – no doubt part joke and part apologia – the CLPD’s demand for mandatory reselection of sitting Labour MPs, though branded as a ‘loony left’ entryist stratagem at the time, was in fact New Labour avant ...”

“... Missile Crisis. Martin Luther King’s stern admonishment of the white moderate in his letter from Birmingham jail is sandwiched between the story of Blockbuster losing out to Netflix and an account of deadly night raids into Afghan civilians’ homes in a chapter called ‘Action’.The US corporate world has long adored ‘how to succeed’ manuals. Dale ...”

“... anti a lot of other people.’ Three years earlier, Conquest had told the demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft – co-author with Robert Davies of Years of Hunger, a study of Soviet agriculture in the famine era – that it was not his opinion that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he ...”

“... Wittgenstein before going to teach Classics at the University of Southampton. In 1939 he moved to Birmingham, where he died of a heart attack in 1950. At this point he was head of the linguistics department, a member of the British Communist Party and an admirer of Stalin. Mikhail was the quiet brother, who craved uneventfulness. He was a most successful ...”

“... West Coast, through Bundoran, Ballyshannon, Donegal town, is like some pleasant amble in a George Birmingham novel: always when I go this way I think of Ireland pre-1912, a peaceful island moving towards Home Rule. An illusion on an illusion, but the convivial peaceableness of these country towns always brings back that time. When we get back to Ballyiriston ...”

“... Road, Blackwall Tunnel. The site which has been nominated, after outflanking a rival proposal from Birmingham, as fitting turf for the New Millennium Experience, was once the resting place for the carpet-wrapped cadaver of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. This sinister wasteland, first left out of the tunnel, marked the limits of Lambrianou’s imagination. And the ...”

“... the failure to disclose such material which led to the wrongful conviction of Judith Ward and the Birmingham Six, among others, and those scandals led to a liberalisation of the disclosure process. Governed at the time by the common law, the regime was altered in the early 1990s by the judiciary, without any need for legislation. Despite (or perhaps because ...”

“... tangential subject matter Meades’s programmes have been. He talks about the suburbs of Brussels, Birmingham’s road system or the churches of the 1960s as if they were the most important, intellectually intricate things around. Which, of course, they often are: what need is there, he asks, for Donald Judd when there’s the Isle of Grain? There are ...”

“... into England could be a bit of a trial. Like the time Seamus nearly got arrested at Birmingham Airport.’HEANEY: That’s right. Your man stopped me and he said, ‘What’s the purpose of your visit?’ and I said, ‘To educate the English,’ and that was it. Kept me there under the Prevention of Terrorism. I had to explain it was a joke.We ...”

“... to the death penalty today,’ he says, ‘is the contemporary equivalent of abolitionism.’ Stephen Bright, the lead counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, whose archives were the starting point for McFeely’s exploration of the way capital punishment actually works, sees himself as belonging to a tradition that goes back to the early days of ...”

“... phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the ...”

“... speech acts’, we remain condemned to a ‘static view of any given sonnet’. Gently criticising Stephen Booth’s account of the contrary pulls in sonnet 146, she that grants that his discussion is ‘interesting’, but finds it too preoccupied ‘with meaning alone’. The editorial and critical accounts published over the last thirty years do not pay ...”

“... was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin became worried about the competence of these two surgeons to perform some of the more risky operations on small ...”

“... was shown on TV. The film, written by the Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by ...”