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“... The late Professor Tate of Manchester University, I have been told, made his last ascent of Scafell pike at the age of 93. I made my last ascent of Pillar at the age of little more than seventy. I used to go abroad at least once a year and often twice. Now I have put all that behind me and have been content for a long time with Yarmouth mill in the Isle of Wight ...”

“... moved to say so. Such were the sixty thousand trade unionists who met in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester in August 1819 and were greeted by the yeomanry, who charged at them with sabres, killing 11 and wounding around four hundred. After the Peterloo massacre, however, politics seemed to settle down again into its accustomed unrepresentative groove. The ...”

“... the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ...”

“... can one object, except aesthetically, to the silly term ‘Camelot’. Mrs Kennedy did indeed tell William Manchester, for a fawning profile that he wrote just after the assassination, that her late husband – who loathed the classical music soirées that she arranged at the White House for artists like Pablo Casals – had thoroughly enjoyed the ...”

“... to qualify for the World Cup. The most important managers in English football were Scottish. Manchester United were beginning their winning streak under Alex Ferguson (from Govan); his rivals were George Graham (Bargeddie) and Kenny Dalglish (Dalmarnock). Poor Eric Cantona had to do the whole moody Frenchman act by himself. But by 1996 football was ...”

“... children need it’) and Sunlight Soap.Ian Allan once had shops in Birmingham, Cardiff and Manchester as well as London; Glasgow had the Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade; Edinburgh still has Harburn Hobbies in Elm Row; and London, Manchester and Edinburgh all had branches of Bassett-Lowke, their windows ...”

“... most conventional kind of biographical description. De Quincey was born in 1785 at Greenhays, in Manchester, the fifth child of a successful merchant. The beginnings of his career are visible in his parental influences and their fate: his father died when Thomas was seven, leaving a gap in nature that de Quincey would spend many anxious years trying to ...”

“... Phil Daniels to be a guest vocalist on their follow-up, Parklife. Oasis’s very public love for Manchester City FC (then the hopeless, pre-oil-money rival to the all-conquering Manchester United) made clear their authenticity as real, which is to say long-suffering, football fans.The status of football in this festival of ...”

“... any claim to being considered middle-class. At 15 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College in Manchester, which was at that time still principally an institution for preparing students for entry to Oxford, Cambridge and London. Gissing was a star student until the moment in his third year when he was caught stealing money, and was expelled and then gaoled ...”

“... as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a ...”

“... record labels like EMI, Decca and Pye had started to refine the art of hit-making, and Manchester had an import record shop bringing American rhythm and blues direct to Northern youth. By the mid-Sixties Jamaican sound systems in South London, Birmingham and the North of England were playing the bluebeat and ska records that marked the ripening of ...”

“... into conflict is illustrated by the saga of the Ordsall Chord, a sliver of new line being built in Manchester. It’s only 370 yards long and will cost £260,000 a yard – there’s a new bridge involved – but will, for the first time, link Manchester’s two main stations, Victoria and Piccadilly. This tiny bit of ...”

“... and Wythburn Waters to form one lake, Thirlmere, so that water could be piped ninety miles to Manchester – in the teeth of fulminations from Canon Rawnsley, Ruskin and Carlyle – is told in detail but from a managerial or public-speaker viewpoint. There is little about the workers who developed a whole culture of school and chapel while they were ...”

“... mythmakers. Alison Uttley created Little Grey Rabbit (1929-1973), Richmal Crompton thought of Just William and kept him going for 48 years, May Annette Beauchamp invented herself as Elizabeth. All three of them were, and had to be, resilient women, gallant survivors, Elizabeth in particular. As May Beauchamp, she had, after all, a doubtful start. Her father ...”

“... or an accident or a coincidence. But what if something rather like that happens again? What if William McRae, a radical Glasgow solicitor, and a prominent objector to the dumping of nuclear waste in the Galloway hills, is found shot dead in his car with the revolver some twenty yards away in a stream? Are we to assume, as the authorities in Scotland ...”