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“... who disappears, loss of a child and a son. In fact she was singularly fortunate in her marriage. William Gaskell comes across in Jenny Uglow’s narrative as the nicest of men, although he was a patriarch, a workaholic and a Unitarian minister whose reputation grew and expanded as fast as the riches and the poverty of the Greater ...”

“... William Rubinstein is an expatriate New Yorker who has spent his academic life investigating wealth and the wealthy in modern Britain and overturning cherished ideas by looking at the British from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Who Were the Rich?, compiled from probate records, will identify everyone who died in Britain between 1809 and 1914 leaving personal assets of £100,000 or more – which is equivalent to between £8 and £10 million today ...”

“... derive from Wagner’s opera Parsifal or from Liszt’s oratorio Christus, and that the Manchester Symphony Orchestra is usually called the Hallé Orchestra. The Pahlen and Thistlethwaite volumes should be complementary. Instead, they are in sharp contrast with each other. Where Pahlen is vague Thistlethwaite is clear. The latter also has an eye for ...”

“... Smallest Victory describes the model of the battlefield of Waterloo constructed by Captain William Siborne, first exhibited in London in 1838 and now on permanent display in the National Army Museum. The original model featured 75,000 metal soldiers, one centimetre high, in the positions they occupied at the vital moment of the conflict: Napoleon’s ...”

“... his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics ...”

“... frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William Shakespear’s momentous friendship with Ibn Saud, which began Britain’s long and dubious relationship with that dour autocracy and which ended for Shakespear with his death in 1915 while photographing the charge of Ibn Saud’s cavalry, making him ...”

“... keepe them together,’ which he seems to have done. According to the 19th-century bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt (grandson of the other William), ‘the books had lain in a corner of the library time out of mind, unnoticed and unheeded,’ until in 1856 the collection was sold off in parts at Sotheby’s. ‘The ...”

“... and the House of Lords. The actual picture, Dr Alderman reveals, was much more complex: William Cobbett himself was fond of referring to the ‘blaspheming Jews’, Gladstone was a Whig and a great opponent of the Jews at one and the same time, while Disraeli was a Tory and the final Emancipation Act itself was a Conservative measure. How then, Dr ...”

“... from sight. Amends are being made by the current exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and by the collection of specialist studies which doubles as a catalogue. Knight’s background had something in common with that of men like Wedgwood and Watt. He sprang from a Shropshire and Herefordshire family of ironmasters, and kept the ...”

“... Bishop Auckland in County Durham, a former mining town (with a median age of 46), went Tory, while Manchester Gorton, dominated by retail and the public sector, median age 29, stayed with Labour (the party won 77.6 per cent of the vote). Between 1981 and 2011, the number of 16-24 year-olds in newly Conservative Hartlepool dropped by a quarter, while the ...”

“... Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there prematurely only two years after his son was launched (in ...”

“... of the poor could avoid a pauper’s grave or being carved up by anatomists after death. ‘Manchester clubs, for example, paid out £3 as a rule, but some paid £4, or even £5; a basic funeral for a child could be financed for only £1 or £2. There was a saying among women in the ...”

“... Britain Carries Out Second H-Test, Explosion even bigger than the first one,’ the Manchester Guardian reported on Saturday, 1 June 1957. It was the lead news item. The story that followed was datelined ‘Aboard HMS Alert’, Alert being the frigate which housed the representatives of the British press corps invited to see for themselves that Britain, as befitted the third great power in the world, had attained thermonuclear status ...”

“... held his own head high. If the earlier part of Dennis Griffiths’s narrative has a hero, it is William Heseltine Mudford, editor of the Standard from 1874 to 1899. When Lord Salisbury, as Foreign Secretary, imprudently sent him a telegram via his House Steward in 1880, he received this crushing retort: The Editor of the Standard asks permission to return ...”

“... In​ 1765, at the age of eight, William Blake had a vision while walking on Peckham Rye. He saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’. If Blake had kept going, he would have crossed the site which in 1969 became the North Peckham Estate. In postwar Britain, this forty-acre ‘mega-estate’, comprising 1444 homes in 65 multi-storey blocks, offered another kind of vision ...”