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“... tanned and more tired’. The latest contribution from the legion of dishonourers is Stephen Birmingham’s life of the Duchess. Macmillan assure us that the writer is ‘the well-known American popular historian’ (author of The Towers of Love, Heart Troubles and other classics), and that we are offered ‘a truly thoroughgoing ...”

“... belonging in that volume. It was commissioned originally by Barry Hanson, who was producing from Birmingham half-hour plays by new writers – hence the series title, ‘Second City Firsts’. A standard procedure in the commissioning of a play, especially one by an unknown author, is for a synopsis to be written and then, once the producer is satisfied that ...”

“... being used to undercut a conviction. Something similar was attempted by the men jailed for the Birmingham pub bombing whose case has now been referred to the Court of Appeal by the Home Secretary. After conviction, they sued both the Police and the Home Office for damages for the beatings which they have persistently said they suffered first on arrest ...”

“... him for an interview, and natural negotiator that he is, he had matched me by requesting a lift to Birmingham New Street. While I drove him to his train, he spoke skittishly of the politicians with whom he had to treat. The sight of the Cannon cinema on the Hagley Road elicited a lively appreciation of the neglected art of the Western. A short time later, when ...”

“... crimes committed by or ascribed to the Provisional IRA. Asked in debate by Lord Denning why the Birmingham Six had not been charged with treason, the lord chancellor, Lord Hailsham, replied evasively that, while treason was not obsolete, the choice of charge was a matter for the prosecuting authorities. Not long afterwards the attorney general, Sir Michael ...”

“... up another way. I’ve never much fancied heroes. Out with the Indian colonial bungaloid and the Birmingham pressed-steel; the plaster mouldings of diamonds in corduroy also go. Functional it will be, and business-like ... with a rest-room in front, for mothers to nurture more powerful babies to save this ...”

“... raising my head above the parapet to make the point that innocent people had been convicted of the Birmingham, Guildford, Woolwich and M62 bombings. I kept a box in my office labelled A & A (Anonymous and Abuse) in which such missives were deposited. Even now, ten years after my retirement and nearly thirty years after the release of the ...”

“... innocence, there is little doubt that their appeal would have gone the same way as those of the Birmingham Six and the accused in the Carl Bridgewater case. When I reviewed Robert Kee’s book in the LRB in 1987, at a time when none of these references had reached the Court of Appeal, I commented on the psychological difference from the judicial point of ...”

“... when I went on the bench (they had belonged to Leslie Scarman), and the lugubrious butler at the Birmingham lodgings remarked on this as he got me robed on my first day there. I said I wasn’t sorry. ‘Time you started topping them again if you ask me, my lord.’ Having to change into court dress is the more annoying for me because I’ve already changed ...”

“... from other members of the firm in the recent BBC 2 Bookmark programme on Green. Green’s time at Birmingham was clearly the basis of his lifelong loyalty to common life. This was nothing to do with any ideological commitment to classlessness. In a clip from an old black-and-white tape, Green firmly corrects the interviewer’s attempt to place him in the ...”

“... indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à propos of their one encounter, in ...”

“... and forty in the first three-quarters of this century. But from 1977 until the release of the Birmingham Six in 1991, not one royal commission was appointed. It had become the proclaimed task of government to govern, not to appoint bodies to agonise about what should be done. In a lecture I gave in 1988 I found myself speculating that this magnificent ...”

“... convicted for their role in a wrongful conviction.Following the release of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, in 1989 and 1991, almost twenty years after they were found guilty of carrying out IRA bombings on the basis of forced confessions and faulty scientific evidence, a royal commission was set up to consider whether changes were needed in ‘the ...”

“... the Crossley and Ackroyd families at Halifax. Committees could be notoriously indecisive (as at Birmingham) or excessively penny-pinching (as at Preston). And competitions might be rigged (as at Bradford) or their results set aside (as at Glasgow). However much a town hall might be conceived as the embodiment of civic pride, its construction was often ...”

“... with one Eugene Ivanov, then a Soviet naval attaché in London. Profumo had met Keeler through Dr Stephen Ward, with whom the girls had lived, off and on. Rumours began to circulate; the press got hold of the story; Profumo at first denied it, but later admitted it. Suddenly, the police began to investigate Ward; he was prosecuted, tried before Mr Justice ...”