“... obvious pleasure at hunting down the last snuffer-maker in England (67-year-old William Garner of Birmingham, recorded in 1851), Charlotte Brontë’s census return for the same year (occupation: ‘none’), or the family of miners in Glamorgan who as late as 1891 spoke no language other than Welsh (39-year-old Evan James and his sons John and ...”

“... and foremost where you saw Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd. Even in Joseph Chamberlain and Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s ...”

“... by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on innovation as such. Rather, it is a call for a new way of thinking about technological change, not as a sequence of ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... the thunder-box wallahs – ‘I became a field-marshal (I played top of the bill at the old Birmingham Alhambra) and’ – pause – ‘he did not.’ It was the ethic of anarchy, schoolboy anarchy at one level, which was why the cadets shook in unison, but also the anarchy of the artist. If there is an art of war – and it is one of those dreary ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... him out of jail.’ This is a subtle reference, no doubt, to the television campaigns to free the Birmingham Six (World in Action) or the Guildford Four (First Tuesday). Without those programmes ten innocent people would still be in prison for crimes they did not commit. Thames TV’s crime was to broadcast the programme Death on the Rock, which questioned ...”

“... and examined as interesting ‘cultural artefacts’ (this stupidly philistine term is favoured by David Lodge and other members of the new critical generation). They also wish to abolish value judgments and inaugurate a new era of scientific criticism which will overthrow the hegemony of canonical texts. Some find that hegemony so oppressive that they appear ...”

“... was perilously unselfconscious. When two guests said that they had spent the previous night in Birmingham, she responded: ‘Birmingham? Whose place is that?’ By the mid-1950s, Trevor-Roper was regarded as the English-speaking world’s leading expert on Nazi documents. Hitler’s Table Talk was published with a long ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about ...”

“... which says that ‘no foreign court or government shall have jurisdiction in this country’ (Birmingham, 2 October 2018). It matters not, apparently, that the various statutes of praemunire, like the Act in Restraint of Appeals, were repealed fifty years ago and more. The oomph had long gone out of them after the Catholic Emancipation Acts of Wellington ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”