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“... this gracious, boyish, uncompromising scientist to found the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College. ‘The possibility,’ he writes, ‘of investigating man’s transcendental experiences and of building up a body of knowledge about them from first-hand accounts has been a life-long interest which I have always regarded as part of my ...”

“... selves? Urban Britain does not feature, there are no pictures of Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, St Andrews or York. Of London there is a single photograph: the 13th-century tombs in the Temple Church. There is not a glimpse of the town houses of Medieval Britain, Lavenham and the ‘Jews House’ at Lincoln apart (with never a soul in ...”

“... for Useful Knowledge – which, stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a ...”

“... Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems truer to its spirit, as rain keeps falling, ‘day after day of it, torrential’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘drilling the ground and churning up ...”

“... that aspired beyond the provincial lower middle class, he won a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester. There he prepared his way to Oxbridge by passing every exam and winning every prize. His teacherly inclinations showed up early in his supportive cheerleading of fellow students as they approached their own exams, and continued in formal and informal ...”

“... be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He certainly should be. Hone is one of the ‘national heroes of our past’ who struggled to secure our freedoms and to widen the franchise. He fought hard to resist the encroachment of the executive on the province of the judiciary, and now that ...”

“... phrase with Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Craig ‘Hurricane’ Raine; also with William Boyd, who, unlike the rest of us, adds of his manucripts that he ‘would be “very reluctant” to allow any access to them’. (This sounds pretty suspicious – what’s Boyd trying to hide? Ah, maybe his stuff isn’t in his own handwriting ...) This ...”

“... as she might well write today. She was always exasperated with the devious Hyndman, and with William Morris – ‘a fine old chap’ – and Bax when they wavered towards Anarchism. ‘Bax, reasonable on many points, is quite mad on others.’ In the earlier pages family affairs are the staple. Of the two parents, one figures, as Sheila Rowbotham ...”

“... circle round the National Review. That conservatism would not exist but for the dramatic wit of William Buckley, a wit which has choreographed into a not too discordant and blundering ballet a motley cast of themes and characters. Wills’s lively account, in his autobiographical Confessions of a Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has ...”

“... in the Coventry disputes. It accompanies his exhibition currently at the Corner-house Gallery in Manchester. Atkinson is showing new paintings but writes obsessively and partially about Coventry. It’s awfully long and full of footnotes and parenthetical sub-sections that recall or hope to conclude past quarrels. Are these parochial matters? I think not. In ...”

“... stop with Eliot,’ he trumpeted. ‘He is merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’ William Carlos Williams, working fairly happily as a doctor in New Jersey, was to be Pound’s second escapee. Marianne Moore might be his third. At one stage, he envisaged annual liberations – assuming, of course, that a sufficient supply of stifled talent was ...”

“... that would take us to a greener field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically ...”

“... them. Most working-class teenagers went to the movies once or twice a week; young wage-earners in Manchester were spending a third of their leisure time there. The cinema was not merely a technological novelty, but the central site of identity formation. More than any other medium, film taught the teenagers of the rising glass and concrete world how to ...”

“... In 1828 Macaulay identified the press as ‘a Fourth Estate of the Realm’; by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know ...”

“... Wallace Stevens’s house (he didn’t die there); Emily Dickinson’s homestead (she did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on Boston Harbor; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, which reassembled Marianne Moore’s Brooklyn living space on its own third ...”