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“... British men serving overseas. According to Alma LaBadie, speaking at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, the ‘condition of forgiveness’ was often to send the child ‘elsewhere’. Dr Barnardo’s Homes registered as an adoption society in 1947; it was noted that the charity accepted children ‘of dusky skin’ but would struggle to find ...”

“... evolved slowly: the first professor of geriatric medicine wasn’t appointed until 1965 (William Ferguson Anderson at Glasgow). The treatment of geriatric patients was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic ...”

“... announce imminent triumph for parties that then lost elections – most spectacularly in 1945. William Maxwell (‘Max’) Aitken, born in 1879, was a restless son of the manse. His father was a Church of Scotland minister from Torphichen, near Linlithgow, who ended up ‘called’ to a congregation in New Brunswick. Max grew up in a heavily Scottish ...”

“... as it was possible to get – was first heard soon after war broke out in September 1939. William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, delivered his commentaries on the progress of the war from a studio in Hamburg with a brio that made him, in Stourton’s words, a ‘genuine star at a time when the BBC was still dominated by the cult of anonymous authority, by ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... to them.)The Highland Clearances stood apart from the everyday experience of having relatives in Manchester, Queensland or Vancouver: the evictions and cottage-burnings of the previous century were a long way from the easy matter of boarding a liner west from Greenock or a train south from Glasgow. But in what was still an emigrant country, many people must ...”

“... from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.”’ Has there been a year when such a book would make the Booker ...”

“... machine broke down.The man who improved on the vacuum tube was the London-born American physicist William Shockley. After the war, Shockley was employed at Bell Labs, the research branch of the US telephone monopoly, AT&T. He realised that certain chemical elements could perform a similar function of encoding and transmitting 1s and 0s. Conducting materials ...”

“... looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have used the 1832 miniature by William Thomson of a 22-year-old Gaskell, or perhaps Richmond’s 1851 drawing (there isn’t as much difference between them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took ...”

“... of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his ...”

“... what Europe chose to bestow. Scottish steamships, German artillery, cotton goods from Lille or Manchester, French electrical engineering, cognac, whisky and the White Fathers. We know all that. But what strikes me, when it comes to the export of institutions rather than hardware and colonists, is the slight but pervasive sense of the inappropriate. To ...”

“... one senses the pleasure of writing books and composing copy (Nevinson for the Daily Chronicle and Manchester Guardian, Davidson for the Times, the Economist, the Daily Herald and the Mirror). In 1904, at the suggestion of Harper’s Monthly, Nevinson embarked on a journey to Angola and São Tome, where he investigated the persistence of slave labour. He ...”

“... not see me,’ she said, ‘they just lay their eyes on me.’ In Reno in the summer of 1960, the Manchester Guardian journalist Bill Weatherby found himself Monroe’s confidant. He couldn’t quite understand why, but thought it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started ...”

“... Motor Corporation’s new Mini. They were married in 1957 and Jill moved into his medical digs in Manchester, where the wallpaper had a bone motif. Keen to avoid the communal dining-room, with its clientele of fusty bachelor surgeons, she tried the kitchenette. ‘I went in and opened the first cupboard,’ she said. ‘I was literally showered with old bones ...”

“... the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised ...”