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“... in comparison with the OED’s rather minimal notation (a first usage in 1982 and a location in Birmingham). To accept the case put forward in the ‘Chrestomathy’ that ‘giving a damn’ derives from giving a dam (a sum of money in Hindustani) is to open the door to a whole history of contacts and borrowings. The task of the now dominant language ...”

“... Parliament, and once produced in massive quantities in a celebrated factory (since demolished) in Birmingham. Now, bottles of HP sauce are manufactured in Holland by Heinz. The Palace of Westminster still features on the label but, since the revival of the Scottish Parliament in 1998, this building no longer houses the only legislature in ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... or the Witches’ Dance was put on in connection with the Painlevé show at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, which includes four other films and nine large-format photographs (until 4 June). In his basement studio in Montparnasse, he attached a microscope to his camera and trained it on his aquariums, alternating powerful lights to produce different ...”

“... me, by which time my train is in. 25 January. Having spoken at Norwich I trek across England to Birmingham to speak there, never more conscious of Larkin’s strictures about going round the country pretending to be oneself. It’s a beautiful morning, the flat fields made dramatic and Dutch by floods and huge skies, but the whole journey ruined by two ...”

“... Much of the enthusiasm for Brutalism has come from cities other than London, such as Glasgow, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle and Manchester (which even has its own retro-Brutalist magazine, The Modernist), but Harwood argues that London dominated the postwar decades in architecture almost as much as it does today. No local authority even remotely ...”

“... on stilts, both from the Sassoon family album. Colour brought photographs of champion roses (‘Birmingham Post’, a cross between ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Wendy Cussons’, from the National Rose Society’s Annual) and of rather dull canapés (from Good Housekeeping Colour Cookery of 1967). Nothing, it seemed, was so distant, hidden or commonplace ...”

“... in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present conclusions, evidence now available proves that some things almost certainly did happen and others did not.’ Freedman’s parents, Jewish refugees who settled in ...”

“... Parliament. The argument against was rehearsed at the eleventh hour by Lord Chalfont, talking to David Dimbleby on BBC 1. Lord Chalfont was against the televising of the House of Lords because he suspected that it was just a stratagem on the part of the broadcasters so that they could force the door of the House of Commons, after which the House of ...”

“... museums and libraries, swimming pools and playing fields. The imperative was often religious: in Birmingham, the new doctrine of ‘municipal socialism’ found its spokesmen in Nonconformist ministers determined that their prosperous congregations should act for the common good. In 1884, R.W. Dale preached that councils can prevent … tens of thousands of ...”

“... on to recommend and support the madness of the Lords’ rejection of the Budget. Like Mr Mackay, David Dutton has lumbered his book with a subtitle: ‘Gentleman in Politics’. Austen Chamberlain was certainly in politics and probably a gentleman. But it is not clear whether ‘a gentleman in politics’ is meant to describe some particular political ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... a year ago unknown in Britain and today unknown throughout the world. The other part, under David Owen, is being re-launched as the political wing of Sainsbury’s. At the Labour Conference there was little rejoicing over the demise of the Alliance: instead, the Party engaged in a self-critical assessment of its own part in bringing about a decade of ...”

“... unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... of a predacious Industrial Revolution, hugging for comfort Jane Austen’s moth-eaten mantra about Birmingham, that nothing much could be expected from that quarter, ‘English’ at Cambridge was to be the prosecution of Liberalism by other means. At least this made a change from the agendas of scholars whose politics were less readily discernible, such as ...”