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“... housing schemes. In big cities, the proportion of public land varied between 33 per cent in Birmingham and 65 per cent in Manchester. As Christophers writes, ‘British urban space literally became, in considerable measure, public space, inasmuch as its ownership lay substantially with the state,’ and in some places the same was true of the ...”

“... in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker prize and new ...”

“... faced with evidence of the dangers of US blood products, Labour’s minister of state for health, David Owen, had told the House of Commons that he was funding an effort to make Britain self-sufficient in blood products by 1977. But he was given a new brief in 1976. The Labour government dropped the commitment to self-sufficiency soon after, apparently for ...”

“... In her book Estates (2007) Lynsey Hanley, who was brought up on a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, mocks architectural critics who describe various notorious London council tower blocks as inspiring ‘a delicate sense of terror’ or ‘incredibly muscular, masculine, abstract structures, with no concession to an architecture of ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... tour that swept her from a lunchtime engagement at Hatchards in Piccadilly to an evening spot in Birmingham, and then, on successive days, a progress through Manchester, Norwich, Cambridge, Chester. With her usual good humour, she pitched product, defacing virgin title pages with her neat holograph signature. Punters, publishing flotsam in red suits, local ...”

“... with satisfaction the progress that has been made. They suggest an itinerary. Day 1: starting in Birmingham, ‘you will be enchanted by old and new exhibits that tell the story of a people and a movement.’ Day 2: ‘travel to Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the civil rights march began in 1965 and where law enforcement personnel confronted ...”

“... Since his constituency was due to disappear in a boundary change, he found himself a safe seat at Birmingham Stechford, which he represented from 1950 until he went to Brussels as president of the European Commission in 1976. As Campbell rightly notes, MPs during Jenkins’s long first spell on the opposition benches (1951-64) enjoyed a considerable degree of ...”

“... of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was ...”

“... counterpart to the Kennedys’ overseas imperial bluster. After the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the death of four small girls, JFK temporised like mad in the face of racism and intimidation. In a meeting with Birmingham’s white leadership he denounced the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating ...”

“... house in Church St has rather come down in the world since then and is now an outpost of Birmingham University, but in its heyday it was home to a writer with some claims to be the most widely read, in English and in translation, across the world. Visitors already knew so much because Marie Corelli not only boasted the longest entry in Who’s ...”

“... is now known as BPP University; together with BPP Professional it has study centres in Abingdon, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Maidstone, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Reading, Newcastle, Nottingham and Southampton, as well as sites in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. In 2011 Sovereign ...”

“... bias, the named writers having birthplaces in Manchester, Norfolk, Inverness, Glossop and Birmingham. It’s true Crace was born in St Albans, but he has lived down the stigma of this perceived advantage by sensibly moving north. One constituent of the literary world that is ignored equally by Books and Lost for Words is the critic. You might think ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... Satan it emerges that the plan is to hold conferences soon afterwards in Leicester, Manchester and Birmingham. One of the brothers stands prominently at the back of the hall holding a mobile phone. It rings very loudly and the speaker breaks off. The man with the phone walks up and down talking intently in Arabic. Then he shakes his head. ‘Well,’ he ...”