Search Results

“... rich portrait of the small but growing British Salafi community, one woman describes her move to Birmingham as a ‘petit hijra’, or small migration, the same term used for a believer’s move to an Islamic state, in an echo of the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. All that fell away in the aftermath of the 7 July attacks, which prompted ...”

“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... adds that the speech was delivered to the Conservative Political Centre ‘at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham; that is to say, in the modern-day regional capital of Offa’s Mercia’. Though Robinson deserves credit for tracing Offa’s spoor back to the Midland Hotel, he baulks at drawing any conclusions from this sinister conjunction of Black Country ...”

“... Partly for commercial and partly for aesthetic reasons, Fanny buys an empty Victorian church in Birmingham, in the middle of an area scheduled for redevelopment as a Leisure Park. Fred Jobling, a middle-aged Council official wedded to the idea of the Park, tries to obstruct the purchase only to fall wildly in love with Fanny, who inexplicably (given ...”

“... is Coventry, conveniently down the road from the sociologists’ home base at the University of Birmingham. Perhaps Madge and Weinberger thought it would be a straightforward task to anatomise an art school. Yet they were obviously bewildered by their Coventry experience. It’s not simply that they were visually incompetent, hadn’t a clue about looking ...”

“... times over. The story is frankly horrific, starting with Murdoch’s first vacation job on a Birmingham newspaper, when he advised the proprietor (a friend of his father’s) to sack the editor. It gets into its stride with the sacking of an old friend as editor of the first newspaper he owned simply because he wrote too friendly an obituary of Nye ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”

“... rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are still British, and deserving of the state’s ...”

“... initially to a protectionist southern Toryism, Hazeldine suggests, the region – especially Birmingham – was held back by its reluctance to give up smaller-scale artisanal manufacture, before being nudged from Liberalism into a more southern-aligned Unionism by the ‘charisma and political machine’ of Joseph Chamberlain. The North emerges as the ...”

“... When Tooley stepped down in 1988 he’d been with the House since 1955, first as assistant to David Webster, the Liverpool department-store manager who’d built it up from its wartime use as a dance-hall, and then for 18 years as general director. The high point of Webster’s reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley presided over the rather ...”

“... Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman. No one mentioned the atrocity in Charleston explicitly; no one had to. We were in the ...”

“... the Montgomery bus boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago ...”

“... provides a fascinating sub-plot to Linda Colley’s story of the making of Britons. Recently, David Stevenson’s innovative The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710 (1988) has attempted to shift the focus of Masonic reorganisation away from 18th-century England, to investigate the experience of Scottish Masonry between the Schaw ...”

“... A bout of dirigisme from the centre having failed in the 1850s, well-governed cities such as Birmingham had briefly savoured near medieval measures of independence from central control, like towns which showed the local time on the clocks before the coming of the railways. The County Councils Bill might have been, Davis says, ‘the last occasion on ...”