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“... provides a fascinating sub-plot to Linda Colley’s story of the making of Britons. Recently, David Stevenson’s innovative The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710 (1988) has attempted to shift the focus of Masonic reorganisation away from 18th-century England, to investigate the experience of Scottish Masonry between the Schaw ...”

“... A bout of dirigisme from the centre having failed in the 1850s, well-governed cities such as Birmingham had briefly savoured near medieval measures of independence from central control, like towns which showed the local time on the clocks before the coming of the railways. The County Councils Bill might have been, Davis says, ‘the last occasion on ...”

“... to be cheering on the defeat of the British army in South Africa. He held an anti-war meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, the heartland of Chamberlain’s political fief, and insisted that it go ahead when everyone from the chief constable down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union Jack-waving mob of 30,000 ...”

“... relationship with local industry, usually of a practical kind. Some civic universities, like Birmingham University, were designed as ‘business’ universities, explicitly opposed to the Oxford and Cambridge model. These local relationships, however, tended to decay, partly because the universities themselves increasingly became national ...”

“... 1980). The team came together during May’s long tenure at the Home Office. Timothy is from Birmingham, where his father was a steel worker, and he studied politics at the University of Sheffield. Hill, a journalist from post-industrial Greenock on the west coast of Scotland, was less obviously policy-focused than Timothy, but her role extended far ...”

“... is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations. The Bank of England takes emergency action to stave off financial panic following the ‘mini-budget’. David Bowie implores ...”

“... in January 1941. The atomic bomb project was set in motion in 1940 by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 Peierls engaged Fuchs to ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...”

“... moral cowardice and vacillation on Palestine, it helped lose the party seats in Leicester, Birmingham, Blackburn and Dewsbury, and smashed the majorities of Wes Streeting, Jess Phillips and Rushanara Ali, whose seat had been Labour’s second safest in 2019. Mutterings about sectarian or communal politics fail to see that Palestine is a catalyst for ...”

“... offered was at Colley Lane School in Cradley Heath, a town in the industrial Black Country west of Birmingham – a twenty-mile train ride from Droitwich that took him into an alien world for which he was totally unprepared. Disraeli had once described Cradley Heath as the ‘Hell Hole of England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... such claims were moot. Scargill led a mass picket of miners to the Saltley coke depot outside Birmingham, recruited the support of the local engineers’ union and saw the thick blue line of the forces of law and order snap and the cops scamper for higher ground.The Saltley événements and their analogues put an end, at some remove, to the ...”

“... in India, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We don’t need theology or metaphysics to understand the enduring legacy of slavery or colonial brutality. We know the social dynamics. In the United States, for example, slavery and segregation were, for a whole people, forms of legislated ...”

“... Democracy, as the editor of Tribune in the mid-1980s, and notably in the campaign to quash the Birmingham Six’s convictions. As he comments here – no doubt part joke and part apologia – the CLPD’s demand for mandatory reselection of sitting Labour MPs, though branded as a ‘loony left’ entryist stratagem at the time, was in fact New Labour avant ...”

“... have four dozen, which I pack into my towel. A plenary line of Seamus Heaney’s about the singer David Hammond’s thatched cottage at Dooey comes to mind – ‘I say to myself Gweebarra.’ Then I think of these lines from another poem, ‘Oysters’: Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ...”