Manchester unspun is an account from punk to the pandemic of how the 1982 opening of the Hacienda gave the kiss of life to a dying city centre, and of the chain reaction it began leading to today’s dynamic international city. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. One night on the town he stumbled across one of his earliest developments, a former paper factory tucked into a side street near Oxford Road, which he turned into open-plan apartments in 1994.

Manchester unspun begins in the post-industrial gloom of a city still bearing the scars of the Second World War and ends among the shiny towers of an aspiring twenty-first-century metropolis. When the article came out each of the positive points made by the other contributors was juxtaposed with a negative repost from myself. 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. As boss of his own PR company, he promoted the dynamic post-industrial Manchester throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Last week I attended a 10th anniversary reception for Civic Engineers, a national engineering consultancy that started out in Manchester.

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. Andy is a journalist and PR guru who has written a warts-and-all exposé of the city’s recent renaissance. There were pockets of vibrant cultural scenes starting to emerge; my good friend Tony Wilson’s infamous assault on the music scene and the renowned Haçienda nightclub started a cultural appreciation that permeated everyday life … we hoped we could bring the physical architecture to match a new cultural scene. R eaders will enjoy the joyous mix of the author’s encounters with a who’s who of famous Mancunians, from Morrissey to Bernard Manning, Shaun Ryder to Sir Alex Ferguson, Frank Sidebottom to Andy Burnham, with walk-on parts from Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Anna Friel, Lemn Sissay, Caroline Aherne, Mick Hucknall and Jonathan Ross. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine City Life before working for the Manchester Evening News and creating his own PR firm.

Manchester Unspun is a remarkable record of the city’s emergence from industrial decline over the past fifty years. I still cringe when I think about that piece and the impact on my prospects for getting work in Manchester were as drastic as they were for Martin. Spinoza’s engaging thesis is that the quixotic cultural revolution led by the co-founder of Factory Records in the 1980s paved the way for an economic renaissance.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. I bought this for a Mancunian music-mad friend of the right age to appreciate this, and it's had glowing reviews here. By renting out the whole of 1st and 2nd floors of Affleck’s arcade, he learned about letting space to other businesses, and a property entrepreneur was born. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. But as an impeccably connected and longstanding adopted Mancunian, Spinoza is uniquely well-placed to prosecute it.