“... them. Most working-class teenagers went to the movies once or twice a week; young wage-earners in Manchester were spending a third of their leisure time there. The cinema was not merely a technological novelty, but the central site of identity formation. More than any other medium, film taught the teenagers of the rising glass and concrete world how to ...”

“... circle round the National Review. That conservatism would not exist but for the dramatic wit of William Buckley, a wit which has choreographed into a not too discordant and blundering ballet a motley cast of themes and characters. Wills’s lively account, in his autobiographical Confessions of a Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has ...”

“... American and has an enormous fortune.’ Unhappily, it didn’t feed. The Swiss American architect William Lescaze had already been appointed to design the dance school, the model farm, the weaving mill etc. Gropius was thrown the pre-gnawed bones. After working with Maxwell Fry to design one of a pair of complementary and now celebrated houses in Chelsea (the ...”

“... as she might well write today. She was always exasperated with the devious Hyndman, and with William Morris – ‘a fine old chap’ – and Bax when they wavered towards Anarchism. ‘Bax, reasonable on many points, is quite mad on others.’ In the earlier pages family affairs are the staple. Of the two parents, one figures, as Sheila Rowbotham ...”

“... stop with Eliot,’ he trumpeted. ‘He is merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’ William Carlos Williams, working fairly happily as a doctor in New Jersey, was to be Pound’s second escapee. Marianne Moore might be his third. At one stage, he envisaged annual liberations – assuming, of course, that a sufficient supply of stifled talent was ...”

“... phrase with Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Craig ‘Hurricane’ Raine; also with William Boyd, who, unlike the rest of us, adds of his manucripts that he ‘would be “very reluctant” to allow any access to them’. (This sounds pretty suspicious – what’s Boyd trying to hide? Ah, maybe his stuff isn’t in his own handwriting ...) This ...”

“... between the two governments.’ Between negotiations, Franklin wrote a paper for the Manchester Philosophical Society entitled ‘Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures’, in which he suggested that the cold weather was the result of a ‘dry’ fog high in the atmosphere over Europe and North America which blocked the sun’s rays. ‘The ...”

“... peppered moth (then called Amphidasys betularia). The black variant of the moth first appeared in Manchester in 1848 but its population increased as industrialisation caused trees to become sootier; against a dark background, the standard pale moth stood out to predators. Haldane worked out that fifty per cent more of the black moths’ offspring must survive ...”

“... Conservative pamphlet The Right Road for Britain (1949). It was, Macmillan bemoaned, ‘far too Manchester School’. Yet the published pamphlet was tepidly accommodationist, making it clear that the Conservatives would not dismantle Attlee’s welfare state. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, had its Unservile State Group, which pioneered ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... they had always thought so and wondered why they’d ever found themselves spouting such crude Manchester liberalism. Finally, over the past few months, the Liberal Democrats have rediscovered retrenchment and reform and begun to shuffle away from the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and ...”

“... successes in these struggles but saw they could not be other than limited. Empson himself told Sir William Haley: ‘I think it really was rather exhilarating for us to feel that we were fighting alone against the forces of evil.’ And for the rest of his life he would arm himself against various opponents who, merely by disagreeing with him, betrayed their ...”

“... they wished to see chair the Inquiry but the Home Secretary Jack Straw settled on his own man, Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, a retired High Court Judge. He was to be supported by John Sentamu, the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, and Richard Stone, Chairman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. The ...”

“... Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else.’ Later the same day, in a speech in Manchester, he had gone even further, proclaiming that ‘at the moment the danger to a negotiated settlement in Asia is provided by a lunatic fringe in the American Senate.’ After he became leader of the Labour Party in 1963, Wilson placed much emphasis on ...”

“... Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange (‘Dutch finance’) was detestable: it had resulted in ‘the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude … made debt a national habit … credit the ruling power … introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard and dishonest spirit in the ...”