“... Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems truer to its spirit, as rain keeps falling, ‘day after day of it, torrential’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘drilling the ground and churning up ...”

“... the root of English problems were the erosion of the class system, or the defeat of the Cavaliers. William Rees-Mogg, in the Times, rather wittily compared the Gooch and Gower saga to a romance of the Great War. Gruff Sgt Gooch can’t stand dashing Lt Gower, but when the Hun tosses a hand-grenade into their trench, the dashing lieutenant saves the gruff ...”

“... selves? Urban Britain does not feature, there are no pictures of Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, St Andrews or York. Of London there is a single photograph: the 13th-century tombs in the Temple Church. There is not a glimpse of the town houses of Medieval Britain, Lavenham and the ‘Jews House’ at Lincoln apart (with never a soul in ...”

“... this gracious, boyish, uncompromising scientist to found the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College. ‘The possibility,’ he writes, ‘of investigating man’s transcendental experiences and of building up a body of knowledge about them from first-hand accounts has been a life-long interest which I have always regarded as part of my ...”

“... Church’s Icebergs, a prime example of ‘Luminism’, when it was put up for auction by the Manchester convalescent home where it had long hung unadmired, seems to be enough to convince people of the picture’s superlative merits. For less than twice this sum the Getty Museum a few years ago acquired a good-quality Hellenistic bronze statue of a boy ...”

“... for War and severely injuring the Prime Minister. The War Minister thus became a fellow-martyr of William Huskisson, run over at the ceremonial opening of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, also in the presence of a prime minister. In France the authorities tightened up such rules as existed after that mishap, but else-where ...”

“... of his colonel, the Prince of Wales, to resign his commission: ‘Think, your Royal Highness – Manchester!’ To which the Prince replied: ‘Oh, by all means, Brummell – do as you please, do as you please.’ The troops, unable to do as they pleased, were sometimes moved to disaffection. This is where training and tradition counted. Would they still see ...”

“... for Useful Knowledge – which, stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a ...”

“... that aspired beyond the provincial lower middle class, he won a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester. There he prepared his way to Oxbridge by passing every exam and winning every prize. His teacherly inclinations showed up early in his supportive cheerleading of fellow students as they approached their own exams, and continued in formal and informal ...”

“... be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He certainly should be. Hone is one of the ‘national heroes of our past’ who struggled to secure our freedoms and to widen the franchise. He fought hard to resist the encroachment of the executive on the province of the judiciary, and now that ...”

“... that would take us to a greener field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically ...”

“... Slovak negotiators into making impossible demands whose rejection made independence unavoidable. William Hague seems to have toyed with this idea when he was opposition leader between 1997 and 2001. But neither he nor David Cameron were brutal and ambitious enough to go for it. No one seems very interested in an English parliament and few people think much ...”

“... Wallace Stevens’s house (he didn’t die there); Emily Dickinson’s homestead (she did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on Boston Harbor; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, which reassembled Marianne Moore’s Brooklyn living space on its own third ...”

“... in the Coventry disputes. It accompanies his exhibition currently at the Corner-house Gallery in Manchester. Atkinson is showing new paintings but writes obsessively and partially about Coventry. It’s awfully long and full of footnotes and parenthetical sub-sections that recall or hope to conclude past quarrels. Are these parochial matters? I think not. In ...”

“... In 1828 Macaulay identified the press as ‘a Fourth Estate of the Realm’; by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know ...”