Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music

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As an important and urgent intervention in a field of increasing relevance within and beyond the academy, the book offers fresh perspectives on the colonial hangovers in postcolonial Britain from up-and-coming as well as established scholars. Finally, explorations of medieval and modern Islamic sharia, Christian moral theology and Jewish halakhah all highlight how such traditions develop complex meta-rules – rules about rules – for managing the tensions and dilemmas that the use of rules can entail.

He wrote a hatchet piece about me and my ‘French girlfriend’ who, he said, were trying to create Parisienne apartments in Manchester! As the growth strategy acquires an ever more corporate feel (Aviva Studios was originally conceived as “Factory International”), and the future of parts of east Manchester is outsourced to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners, it is sometimes hard not to feel nostalgia for the wilder time when Wilsonian chutzpah was running the show in what locals still refer to as “town”. Its centre was depopulated, decaying, and in violent pockets of its former industrial core, dangerous to visit. He was one of the people who set up City Life, Manchester’s slightly edgier version of Time Out magazine.A flamboyant hybrid, conveying the nitty-gritty of municipal politics and private-public property deals with the zest and wit of the best journalism. The great city may have been transformed but its equally great history and heritage have never been forgotten - it's the original and modern city, Andy Spinoza knew the movers and shakers over the decades, and this masterpiece of a book reveals all. Hélène (now my wife) and I were mortified, the coop was furious, and it took weeks to undo the damage to our reputation with the city council. The Factory aesthetic, channelling Manchester’s industrial past, pointed the way to a future in which spectacle and entertainment would constitute the new production line. His instinct was right; not only were the Ducie House offices in demand from tenants like the experimental dance group 808 State but the party-loving property prince so enjoyed being the host that he opened his own nightclub in the basement.

The book argues that identities and alterities were multiple and versatile, that there was no war between Christianity and Islam during the early modern period, that ‘popular religion’ prevailed over theological principles, that women experienced slavery and religious conversion differently from men, that commerce prevailed over ideology and dogma, and that ‘positive’ human relations among people of different categories were not only possible but inevitable despite prevailing hostile conditions. manchesterhive requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books or journals - to see content that you/your institution should have access to, please log in through your library system or with your personal username and password. He came to study at Manchester University in 1983 and was soon selling posters in the student union’s markets. Coolly analytical, exceptionally well-informed and hugely entertaining, Manchester Unspun does justice to it.Studies of Roman exemplary ethics, early modern Christian theology and the calculation of sin and merit in contemporary Muslim Palestine highlight the challenges posed by the coexistence of moral rules with other moral forms, not least those of virtue ethics. The Haçienda in 1989: ‘Gave the kiss of life to a dying city and sparked a chain reaction of hubris, scandal, money and power politics still playing out today. Bloxham moved swiftly when the opportunity came, with the entrepreneur’s killer feel for change in the air, despite all appearances: ‘When we bought the Smithfield Building the main tenant was bust,’ he said.

This book explores how Muslims, Christians and Jews interacted in frontier zones of the early modern Mediterranean (primarily 1530–1670), and how they developed a frontier consciousness that took into account how their interlocutors thought and acted. In his new book Manchester Unspun, Spinoza introduces us to the architects of the city’s transformation from “post-industrial malaise” to a thriving hub of music, culture and football.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Realising that most of the available posters were old hippy images, he started selling Manchester music album covers. Back at Civic Engineers’ reception last week it was appropriate that we should be talking about the book because it includes the origin story of the practice. Manchester unspun sorts the truth from the spin of the city’s stories to reveal a remarkable journey, describing the hubris,scandal, money and politics which played out during its remarkable reinvention. Shaun Ryder and Liam Gallagher respectively stand up for more traditional Mancunian values by throwing a bottle at the mirror behind the bar and smashing an upmarket vase.

The “24-hour party people” celebrated in Michael Winterbottom’s film homage to Wilson, says Spinoza, created the aura and cachet that helped them sell Manchester around the world and earn the right to host events such as the Commonwealth Games. Nor does he take sides (although there will probably be some names in there smarting) and mercifully avoids the nostalgia and over-sentimentality associated with certain bandwagoning ‘I was there’ accounts of the city (thankfully for the reader, the author hadn’t yet arrived in Manchester when the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall). A sympathetic property consultant tells him: “Gary very much values the views of his consultants – as long as they agree with his own. In a forty-year career he has encountered a who's who of Manchester personalities, from cultural icons such as Tony Wilson to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and influential council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein.

He founded alternative magazine 'City Life' in 1983 and spent ten years as a gossip columnist for the 'Manchester Evening News'. When the author first arrived came to the city over 40 years ago, just 500 people lived in the city centre ('town'); now 75,000 do. Welcome to Manchester, or “Manc-hattan”, as some now like to describe it with a certain degree of ambivalence.