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“... A student had decided to write something about London poetry – was there any? He’d toyed with David Gascoyne’s A Vagrant (‘They’re much the same in most ways, these great cities’), but decided that Paris was the principal focus there. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen ...”

“... hasn’t made public the identities or comments of its respondents in these sixteen areas – Birmingham, Bradford, Calderdale, Derby, Kirklees, Pendle, Slough, Walsall, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Coventry, Hyndburn, Oldham, Peterborough, Tower Hamlets and Woking – but the report candidly summarises their presumptions. ‘We have heard some ...”

“... the Crossley and Ackroyd families at Halifax. Committees could be notoriously indecisive (as at Birmingham) or excessively penny-pinching (as at Preston). And competitions might be rigged (as at Bradford) or their results set aside (as at Glasgow). However much a town hall might be conceived as the embodiment of civic pride, its construction was often ...”

“... here and how might an author guard against its perils? Few writers are as well qualified as David Lodge both to diagnose and to overcome these potential difficulties. One of the leading critics and literary theorists of the past few decades, he has interested himself above all in the mechanics of narration: both the nuts and bolts of expository ...”

“... living in towns like Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester than in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham. Half a century later, the rural élite continued in control as the governing élite, England remained predominantly a horse-drawn society, and the country’s claim to be the greatest sporting nation in the world rested on rural, rather than ...”

“... Fraser might have mixed feelings is The Gift: New Writing for the NHS, an anthology edited by David Morley (Stride, £7.95). The shortest contribution is ‘the underfunder’s utopia’ by Tom Leonard, an asthmatic poet: ‘the state hospital/ with one bed/always full/always efficient’. David Morley is the director ...”

“... he had been dismissed from his post in Germany. Almost 32, with three children, he headed for Birmingham, where he had contacts, in the hope that soon his family could follow. While Betjeman was wooing Penelope Chetwode against the background of her parents’ intense disapproval, publishing his first volume of poetry, Mount Zion (paid ...”

“... Ambition​ , says the pop-up video that recently appeared on the website of Park View Academy in Birmingham. On it, there’s netball, djembe drums, electronics, football, textiles, computing, plus a couple of dissolving-in-hopeless-giggles blooper shots, one with pupils in it, one with staff. ‘I’ve been at Park View for many, many years,’ one staff ...”

“... to be gaining a presence not just in politics but in pop culture too. That same month, May 1976, David Bowie was photographed at Victoria Station on his return to Britain after two years in North America. Standing in an open-topped Mercedes, he appeared to give his fans some kind of open-handed, straight-armed – possibly fascist – salute. Soon afterwards ...”

“... He has a green belt in jujitsu and a blue belt in Taekwondo, acquired in classes in his native Birmingham, and speaks English, Urdu and Arabic, along with some Pashto and a little Bosnian. What the Americans got when they captured him was a small – 5’3’’ – Brummie of Indian Muslim descent, an intellectually curious autodidact, a zealous, pious ...”

“... writing is recognisably clean, clear and colloquial, only occasionally falling into what David Hare calls ‘the Esperanto patter of the higher mysticism’. From the start, Brook avoids ‘personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences, excesses, names of close friends, private angers, family adventures or debts of gratitude’, though there is ...”

“... not to have been stripped out and exported to Japan’. How different from his final slog from Birmingham to catch the count at Huntingdon, which evinces the comment that ‘a journey across west central and east central England by major road is best occupied reading proofs.’ So that’s how the book came into my hands within a week of polling day! If ...”

“... tanned and more tired’. The latest contribution from the legion of dishonourers is Stephen Birmingham’s life of the Duchess. Macmillan assure us that the writer is ‘the well-known American popular historian’ (author of The Towers of Love, Heart Troubles and other classics), and that we are offered ‘a truly thoroughgoing biography’. But it is ...”

“... were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering of his tenure in public office. This latter involved no known larceny or perversion of law: Mr Stockman gained ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”