“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... for People’, published in a widely read paperback anthology The Exploding Metropolis, edited by William H. Whyte. Her argument in these essays – that cities can and should be understood on foot, by ordinary people, non-experts – gradually developed into a fixation with the damage done to cities by ‘projects’. Her use of the term wasn’t confined to ...”

“... half a century of preoccupation with dreams, hysteria, hypnosis and divided personality led up to William James’s chapter on ‘The Self’ in his textbook of psychology, published before Erikson was born. Brothers William and Henry: there were two with identity tangles to sort out! All the same, it was only as society ...”

“... Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he defeated Dick Taverne (later a Labour MP) and William Rees-Mogg (later the editor of the Times) for the Union presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining performances on radio (particularly in Any ...”

“... the West Indies quadrupled between 1781 and 1791, shipped across to factories in Liverpool and Manchester. By the 1780s, the majority of the cotton sold in markets around the world was produced by African slaves. The connection with the plantations was sometimes explicitly evoked. Juliette Récamier, the Parisian salon hostess, liked to sport the headwrap ...”

“... speak nothing but German. The nearer I got to England, the cheaper goods were. As soon as I got to Manchester, I laid out all my money, things were so cheap, and I made good profit.’ The journey he describes occurred in 1799, and two hundred years later one still senses his intelligence, elation and straightness. The first illustration in the book, a ...”

“... structure and political activity, between contemporary issues and contemporary writers, between Manchester and Birmingham, Melbourne and London. By such illuminating comparisons and aptly-chosen examples, Briggs has built up an unrivalled panorama of the range and riches of Victorian life. But what has given Briggs’s work its real immediacy and appeal is ...”

“... from sympathisers in England are themselves evidence of anxiety. When the rebels arrived in Manchester, a centre of Jacobitism, on 28 November there were public celebrations among avowed Jacobites and a small Manchester regiment was raised. Yet there was continual evidence of reticence among even supposed ...”

“... well away from the diplomatic quarter in Arts and Crafts country at Hammersmith. This was where William Morris lived at Kelmscott House and where in October of that year he died. It was Morris, along with Ruskin and occasionally Goethe, whose writings gave Muthesius the epigraphs for his book, and it was in Morris himself, as ‘an individual with the ...”

“... more than a page to the paramilitary group Tara, best-known for the links between its founder, William McGrath, and the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal. Although Tara has not been held responsible for terrorist outrages, many of the people who later became key figures in both the UDA and the UVF began their paramilitary careers there. The ...”

“... he published the first of his books to be written in English, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius. His parents stayed in Germany where, soon after his father’s death in 1940, his mother killed herself to escape the camps. Pevsner and his family were to remain permanently in this country.The idea for The Buildings of England ...”

“... Family of Darius in the National Gallery. It was purchased in 1889 for the City Art Gallery of Manchester by a group of local supporters. The creation of the British regional galleries in the 1870s and 1880s is not mentioned by Spalding but, as was clear from Palaces of Art, an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the winter of 1991-92, and from the ...”

“... Gaskell’s place in critical discussions of industrialism, or at least the place of her two Manchester novels, Mary Barton and North and South. Others remained more attached to the Knutsford Gaskell who wrote Cranford, Wives and Daughters and Cousin Phillis. Those tenderly detailed studies of provincial life, they argued, contained Gaskell’s best and ...”

“... so perhaps it was Mackintosh’s fault it burned down.The fourth of the eleven children of William McIntosh, a clerk in the Glasgow police force, and Margaret Rennie, Mackintosh had an unremarkable childhood. Indeed, as his biographer Alan Crawford puts it, his entire career was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled ...”

“... in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ‘goddesses’ of ‘Proportion’ – in effect, compliance with the status quo – and ‘Conversion’, a desire to subdue and control. As Hussey points out, this passage constitutes a rare intrusion on the part of the ...”