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“... and the way their parents dress, then The Underground Empire’s first 1100 pages are for you. Mr Mills is a master of that genre of reporting which, when recording a conversation, never fails to detail, not only the décor of the restaurant where it took place (interviews happen mainly at mealtimes) and how the food was cooked, but also adds the biographical ...”

“... a fearsome reputation, equal to that of opium. William Caine, an 1890s abolitionist MP quoted by James Mills, claimed it was the ‘most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced’. In 1924, the Egyptian statesman Mohamed El Guindy called it ‘a terrible menace to the whole world’. A moral panic in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly in America but ...”

“... drunks with matches’, and ‘a dawn as pink and blue as litmus paper’. Like Anne Rouse, Paul Mills does not have his own voice: ‘All day the sun was an explosion/ Cooling to long slants in the grass.’ This could have been written any time in the last thirty years, by anyone. But Mills is always a good mimic, and he ...”

“... public (those readers whose purchases today range from the Sunday Sport, through Guns and Ammo, Mills & Boon, to Asian Babes) are still Laplanders as far as their betters are concerned; nor has academic investigation gone much beyond Orwell’s bathysphere approach. McAleer’s book is one of the first of its kind to work from the archives and business ...”

“... of the valley, where the mill-owners built their fine houses away from the soot and fibres of the mills along the valley floor. Later, we moved next door, carrying our belongings through a gap in the hedge, before my father died one day in the back yard. The Church of England then made my Yorkshireness even more shaky by providing a free boarding-school place ...”

“... either way, like the signpost to a pair of English villages, we are directed towards ‘the Mills’. Mill St James or Mill St John? On arrival there is no option since only John Stuart Mill is on the map. How frustrating to run out of fresh clues (see Utilitarianism is there, of course) just at the point when an ...”

“... World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long bridled at interference by trustees and college presidents. With some associates at the New Republic, Beard and Robinson hatched plans for a ‘new’ school. ‘New’ was in the air. The New Republic had been founded just ...”

“... Belfast and to find out what was going on politically in that depressing and bigoted city of linen mills and shipyards. The Orangemen were contemptuous of the Southern Irish and had a blustering condescension to Englishmen like myself, and one of the few people whose talk was a relief from this was Forrest Reid, a novelist and critic in his late ...”

“... bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence and ...”

“... The coal pit is a field. Urban grasslands and carparks have buried the foundations of the mills. The house he grew up in has been demolished and replaced by a traffic island. The school which taught him the careful handwriting has made way for a supermarket. Such is the life of the industrial heartlands, and has been ever since the upheavals of the ...”

“... and ships raised by the government of India occupied the Persian port of Bushehr at great expense. James Outram, who lends his name to many neighbourhoods in India, led the British forces. He returned to India to quell the uprising known as the Indian Mutiny – or, depending on your choice of historian, the First Indian War of Independence. As Indian rebels ...”

“... toad work had been well and truly forked off their lives. With the notable exceptions of Magnus Mills and James Kelman, most British writers don’t make a habit of writing about what’s at the centre of most people’s lives. And I don’t mean sex: that’s peripheral, like God. The last great English novel about ...”

“... televised judgment than a somewhat tedious literalism of case-building and ‘healing’, the twin mills of justice and therapy (all those trauma counsellors) grinding away deliberately. Willard Down’s ‘Down’s Syndrome’ sign would not last an unlitigated minute in an actual Texas. But again, the opposite of cartoonishness is not the actual. Ever since ...”

“... harmful, they mobilised millions of people for months at a time on massive work sites or steel mills far from home. During an inspection tour in Hunan, Mao’s home province, in 1958, Peng Dehuai was slipped a note by a crippled veteran: ‘The grain is scattered, the potato leaves are withered, and the young and strong are sent to the steel ...”

“... they would make the needful sacrifice of ease and mortification of appetite’. Poor men left the mills and shops, he explained, and immediately plunged into ‘the groggery, the cigar store, the gambling den or some other haunt of vileness’. ‘Inordinate expenditure’ always caused the misery. Foreign observers were startled at the raucous cycles of boom ...”