“... 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 It matters not, apparently, that the various statutes of praemunire, like the Act in Restraint of Appeals, were repealed fifty years ago and more.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 ...”

“... to those who remember the miscarriage of justice inflicted by the British legal system on the Birmingham Six. Lord Lane held in their 1988 appeal that ‘the longer this hearing has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict was correct.’ The US Court of Appeals seems to have accepted the prosecution case wholesale, convinced ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”

“... rich portrait of the small but growing British Salafi community, one woman describes her move to Birmingham as a ‘petit hijra’, or small migration, the same term used for a believer’s move to an Islamic state, in an echo of the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. All that fell away in the aftermath of the 7 July attacks, which prompted ...”

“... alliance with a progressive middle class was frequently renewed but never with wide success. Birmingham, with its Political Union, was one of the more promising localities. Clive Behagg rejects the long-accepted account of concord being favoured by a small-unit industrial structure: big business took a prominent hand in the Union. This may of course make ...”

“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... Ark’s 39 academies, in some of the most deprived parts of the country. In 2022 an Ark academy in Birmingham received a funding warning after an Ofsted inspector found that ‘some pupils, particularly those who identify as LGBT, experience repeated name-calling and prejudiced behaviour.’ An Ofsted inspector who visited Ark Alexandra Academy in Hastings ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”

“... rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are still British, and deserving of the state’s ...”

“... is Coventry, conveniently down the road from the sociologists’ home base at the University of Birmingham. Perhaps Madge and Weinberger thought it would be a straightforward task to anatomise an art school. Yet they were obviously bewildered by their Coventry experience. It’s not simply that they were visually incompetent, hadn’t a clue about looking ...”

“... times over. The story is frankly horrific, starting with Murdoch’s first vacation job on a Birmingham newspaper, when he advised the proprietor (a friend of his father’s) to sack the editor. It gets into its stride with the sacking of an old friend as editor of the first newspaper he owned simply because he wrote too friendly an obituary of Nye ...”

“... Partly for commercial and partly for aesthetic reasons, Fanny buys an empty Victorian church in Birmingham, in the middle of an area scheduled for redevelopment as a Leisure Park. Fred Jobling, a middle-aged Council official wedded to the idea of the Park, tries to obstruct the purchase only to fall wildly in love with Fanny, who inexplicably (given ...”

“... adds that the speech was delivered to the Conservative Political Centre ‘at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham; that is to say, in the modern-day regional capital of Offa’s Mercia’. Though Robinson deserves credit for tracing Offa’s spoor back to the Midland Hotel, he baulks at drawing any conclusions from this sinister conjunction of Black Country ...”

“... a microphone in a studio. No longer. This series was given to large invited audiences in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Washington DC and Cardiff, each lecture followed by a question and answer session and all of them transcribed and posted online by the BBC. In preparing his texts for book publication, while creditably resisting the temptation to footnote ...”