“... of a predacious Industrial Revolution, hugging for comfort Jane Austen’s moth-eaten mantra about Birmingham, that nothing much could be expected from that quarter, ‘English’ at Cambridge was to be the prosecution of Liberalism by other means. At least this made a change from the agendas of scholars whose politics were less readily discernible, such as ...”

“... intransigence. Regrouping, the Riders proceeded under police escort to Alabama’s largest city, Birmingham. As the bus arrived at the city’s main terminal, the police disappeared. Hundreds of whites ambushed the Riders, beating them with bats, fists and lead pipes. The mob violence had been encouraged by some of Alabama’s leading public ...”

“... as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at Birmingham University, she specialises in the study of early 19th-century popular protest, and her published work on the Chartist movement has been ‘written in general sympathy with it’. As a socialist, she sides with ‘ordinary people’ against the ...”

“... good intentions of the staff’. Writing in the British Medical Journal in 2018 the NHS consultant David Oliver argued that public (as opposed to expert) debate ‘is obsessed with the notion that, when things go wrong in healthcare, this must indicate failures by individuals. In such a narrative, systemic factors … are seen as convenient excuses for ...”

“... mid-century decades of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the wars of Prussian expansion that David French picks up the story. It was evident to the more thoughtful that army and society were not well related to one another, and that the British army, which remained, to an alarming degree, a body apart, contrasted painfully with the efficient citizen ...”

“... own deterrent because it could not depend on the US being willing to sacrifice, say, Chicago for Birmingham. The belief was borne out by Kennedy’s decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis to modify the US/Nato nuclear command and control system: he insisted that should the US attack Cuba and the Soviets retaliate with nuclear strikes on Europe, the US ...”

“... by Niebuhr’s students, or were conversant with his thinking. King’s great ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ would mention Niebuhr as a source of the precept that ‘groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.’ For King himself, according to his biographer David Garrow, Moral Man and Immoral Society was ...”

“... according to entirely new principles” ’. Briggs believed that Manchester ceded the palm to Birmingham, which might be true in terms of radical (i.e. ‘shock’) politics, but, as Howe reminds us, Birmingham remained at loggerheads with the Weltanschauung throughout the century, a parochial and ‘isolated outpost of ...”

“... out what Stuart Hall is up to. Under his aegis, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University moved in the Seventies from left-Leavisism to ethnomethodology, flirted half-heartedly with phenomenological sociology, emerged from a brief affair with Lévi-Straussian Structuralism into the glacial grip of Louis Althusser, moved straight ...”

“... perhaps the best papers in the country. The Yorkshire Post, the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, the Birmingham Post and, in a special position of repute and influence, the Manchester Guardian, yielded nothing in self-esteem to the London papers, although most of them had a guilty secret: they were supported by evening papers whose essential function was to ...”

“... embarrassed when I reminded him that we’d met. He was married with two children and lived in Birmingham. I didn’t ask whether he still believed in battling the kuffar: it seemed unlikely. Ed Husain was completing a similar journey from extremism to integration at around the same time. He was born in East London in 1975 to an Indian father and a ...”

“... that this neglected figure should have grown up in this sleepy forgotten town. After Wem, Birmingham, where I caught a plane to Belfast’s new harbour airport. It wasn‘t a random juxtaposition of places: the Rev. Hazlitt’s family were from the North of Ireland, and at some level my interest in his son’s writings must issue from a recognition ...”

“... Salman Rushdie’s residence also rates a ‘comfortable’, but he’s in Tufnell Park. David Storey’s pad, on the other hand, is fashionably situated but Honest John Haffenden would be lying if he didn’t tell you it was merely ‘roomy’. Top marks go to Pritchett and to Malcolm Bradbury, who wins a hard-to-come-by ‘elegant’ for his ...”

“... to detect this temporal exchange. When Nead describes Miss Havisham’s Satis House in David Lean’s adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) as a ‘Gothic bombsite’ – which it wasn’t – we are assured that it exhibits the ‘colour of the period’, which seems to mean low-key lighting, glutinous blackness and overwrought decor. Cinema is ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”