Next tour: Sat 22 October 2011 – in association with the Manchester Literary Festival. This must be booked at www.quaytickets.com.

Start: Midland Hotel steps, 5pm.

The ghosts of Anthony Burgess, Brendan Behan and Thomas De Quincey haunt the barstools and taprooms of many a Manchester tavern, in particular Thomas’s Chop House on Cross Street. This was where the cotton merchants trading at the Royal Exchange, most likely including that unmatchable social commentator Friedrich Engels, would tuck into a red hot chop at lunchtime in Victorian times. A century later it was a favourite drinking venue of Anthony Burgess, who recalled in his memoirs “hard-headed magnates and cotton brokers gorging red meat in chophouses”. We’ll probably also go to the Peveril of the Peak, still standing in all its green tiled glory, the shape mesmerisingly fanciful, the clothes line slung over the roof garden, and recall how this was the name of Walter Scott’s 1823 novel. But as good bohemians we’ll drink in tales of opium eaters and clockwork oranges, and raise a glass to the forgers of fanciful fables.