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“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... the thunder-box wallahs – ‘I became a field-marshal (I played top of the bill at the old Birmingham Alhambra) and’ – pause – ‘he did not.’ It was the ethic of anarchy, schoolboy anarchy at one level, which was why the cadets shook in unison, but also the anarchy of the artist. If there is an art of war – and it is one of those dreary ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... him out of jail.’ This is a subtle reference, no doubt, to the television campaigns to free the Birmingham Six (World in Action) or the Guildford Four (First Tuesday). Without those programmes ten innocent people would still be in prison for crimes they did not commit. Thames TV’s crime was to broadcast the programme Death on the Rock, which questioned ...”

“... and examined as interesting ‘cultural artefacts’ (this stupidly philistine term is favoured by David Lodge and other members of the new critical generation). They also wish to abolish value judgments and inaugurate a new era of scientific criticism which will overthrow the hegemony of canonical texts. Some find that hegemony so oppressive that they appear ...”

“... was perilously unselfconscious. When two guests said that they had spent the previous night in Birmingham, she responded: ‘Birmingham? Whose place is that?’ By the mid-1950s, Trevor-Roper was regarded as the English-speaking world’s leading expert on Nazi documents. Hitler’s Table Talk was published with a long ...”

“... man, the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-shing? In north-east England, they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about ...”

“... which says that ‘no foreign court or government shall have jurisdiction in this country’ (Birmingham, 2 October 2018). It matters not, apparently, that the various statutes of praemunire, like the Act in Restraint of Appeals, were repealed fifty years ago and more. The oomph had long gone out of them after the Catholic Emancipation Acts of Wellington ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”

“... to those who remember the miscarriage of justice inflicted by the British legal system on the Birmingham Six. Lord Lane held in their 1988 appeal that ‘the longer this hearing has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict was correct.’ The US Court of Appeals seems to have accepted the prosecution case wholesale, convinced ...”

“... alliance with a progressive middle class was frequently renewed but never with wide success. Birmingham, with its Political Union, was one of the more promising localities. Clive Behagg rejects the long-accepted account of concord being favoured by a small-unit industrial structure: big business took a prominent hand in the Union. This may of course make ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”