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“... which it took place. To account for it, Mrs Tynan had to go back to the beginning: to the indulged Birmingham schoolboy who was always to maintain that he really was born on his first day at Oxford. The time to which Ken Tynan bore a symbolic relation was the quarter-century following the Second World War, during which the generation of grammar-school children ...”

“... who, as all O and A-level candidates know, endlessly, remorselessly, ‘develop’? Admittedly, Stephen Potter’s The Muse in Chains had offered to blow the gaff in 1937. But pell-mell postwar expansion, to say nothing of Potter’s decline into a chronicler of comfy national foibles, soon settled its hash. ‘English’ seemed to be just there: as natural ...”

“... how then could Parliament tax them? (The same way they could tax the unrepresented citizens of Birmingham and Manchester, said the ebullient commissioner to the Board of Trade, Soame Jenyns in a pamphlet widely circulated in the year of the Stamp Act.) Or again, Parliament could levy external duties on the colonies, but not internal ...”

“... a microphone in a studio. No longer. This series was given to large invited audiences in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Washington DC and Cardiff, each lecture followed by a question and answer session and all of them transcribed and posted online by the BBC. In preparing his texts for book publication, while creditably resisting the temptation to footnote ...”

“... renationalise the railways if the Tories privatised them, and promised, for instance, that the Birmingham relief road would be built ‘only over my dead body’, now, as Huff and Puff John, presiding over the privatised railways during their most disastrous period since before nationalisation fifty years ago – as well as giving the go-ahead for the ...”

“... are now in doubt – Hanratty (an earlier subject of Paul Foot), the Guildford bombers, the Birmingham pub bombers – there is an evident link between the gravity of the crime and the risk of a miscarriage of justice. Foot chronicles the frustration of the Police as time went by and no worthwhile clue to the identity of the killer or killers emerged ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”

“... up while protesting about the death of another man, Colin Roach, in a police station; £48,699 to Stephen Dowsett and Philip Tape who were walking home from a dance a little drunk when they were bundled into a police van, taken to a police station and so terribly beaten that Dowsett’s jaw had to be re-set in two places; £17,500 to Manit Schemir, a ...”

“... classes have provided the society’s main support ever since the period of consolidation. Stephen Knight’s The Brotherhood is a natural successor to an earlier work on Jack the Ripper, in which Knight set out to show how the five prostitutes murdered in the East End of London in 1888 were the victims of an insane Freemason who inflicted on their ...”

“... manager to the rank of outside broadcast producer, he spent his early years, in London and then in Birmingham, producing anything and everything: from seaside summer shows and circuses to race meetings and general election counts, from Muffin the Mule to the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. Rejecting a good financial offer to move to ITV in 1955, he ...”

“... There are now two Stephen Lawrences. The first, the murdered 18-year-old victim of racism. The second, a cultural balloon with Stephen Lawrence’s image on it: a balloon so large there is barely any space left in which to think objectively about Lawrence, his murder and the subsequent investigations and Inquiry ...”

“... he moved to England as a research professor at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies in Birmingham. Lewin’s international reputation as a Soviet historian was made in the Birmingham years, but his status as a guru for the Marxist wing of Soviet historical ‘revisionism’ came mainly after his relocation to the ...”

“... a long campaign, Uluru was returned to the Pitjantjatjara people by Governor General Sir Ninian Stephen at a ceremony in October 1985. Immediately afterwards the Aboriginal owners signed an agreement leasing the rock and the national park that surrounds it back to the Australian Parks and Wildlife Service for 99 years. The government of the Northern ...”

“... Rossetti, in dreams of fair women and melancholy men. The big exhibition which was in New York and Birmingham, and is in Paris until June, is comprehensive. The first thing that strikes you is his tremendous skill as an organiser of elements on a flat surface. Filling a space – a tapestry, a book illustration or a stained-glass window – with figures seems ...”

“... claim their equipment was so bad they couldn’t hear what Curtis was saying, though the drummer, Stephen Morris, still wonders how they missed the desperation. When they recorded Unknown Pleasures in the studio in April 1979, the band must have been able to hear the lyrics more clearly, but they preferred not to think about what lay behind them. Sumner says ...”