“... 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 ...”

“... where Bloom is Moses the precursor of Christ, the liberator; Parnell is both Moses and Christ; and Stephen is Christ the Hero. However, Joyce’s idea of the Irish nation is inclusive rather than exclusive – it is a definition beyond tribalism, beyond religious creed. And those Irish historians who congratulate themselves on their freedom from tribal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... choreographer ‘did some tango moves’ to evoke the mating dances of birds. The University of Birmingham celebrated with The Rap Guide to Evolution, featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced ...”

“... and he would deliver freezing judgments from on high. Many good books fell under his disapproval. Stephen Cohen’s Bukharin (reprinted in 1980) annoyed Carr because it suggested that Stalinism was not inevitable, and that Bukharin was a serious alternative to it. That was dismissed as ‘fantastic’. Teodor Shanin’s Awkward Class (1972) is something of a ...”

“... new entrepreneurs like Victor Kiam, Lee Iacocca, Donald Burr of People Express, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak of Apple Computers, Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Record-breaking athletes like Roger Bannister find their way onto the roll of honour, as does the Salieri of Amadeus: a peak performer deflected from his mission by hopeless envy of ...”

“... In her book Estates (2007) Lynsey Hanley, who was brought up on a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, mocks architectural critics who describe various notorious London council tower blocks as inspiring ‘a delicate sense of terror’ or ‘incredibly muscular, masculine, abstract structures, with no concession to an architecture of ...”

“... Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an elaborate bomb factory in Birmingham, the Crown charged him and other followers of O’Donovan Rossa with treason. (The plan, it seems, had been to blow up the Houses of Parliament.) Sentenced to life imprisonment, he would eventually become what Ruth Dudley Edwards described as ‘the ...”

“... of August 2017 the figure was 4.1 million.) Stevens’s speech, at an NHS bosses’ conference in Birmingham, was surprisingly blunt and political for a civil servant, the more so because he was speaking immediately after his political chief, the health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Provocatively, Stevens compared the situation in Britain now to the time of the ...”

“... about the CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a ...”

“... crouched over and peering through his magnifying glass, looking for a smoking crater the size of Birmingham. Eventually you come across this glimmer of a clue: ‘Derivatives, assets and liabilities increased reflecting the acquisition of ABN Amro, growth in trading volumes and the effects of interest and exchange rate movements amidst current market ...”

“... on the part of member states, has enormous implications for the Convention. Matters are much as Stephen Sedley predicted in 1997, when he argued that unless it is seen as a ‘living thing, adopted by civilised countries for a humanitarian end, constant in motive but mutable in form, the Convention will eventually become an anachronism’. Perhaps it became ...”