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“... In high criticism, Victorianism is generally presented as the artless antonym of modernity. It fades away anywhere between 1901, the year of Victoria’s death, and 1910, the year of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition (the birth of the modern world, according to Roger Fry); or, more obviously, 1914. The terms of this contrast were clearly implied in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, published in 1918 ...”

“... Sometime in the late Sixties, I was invited, along with some senior socialist historians, to meet Bill Craik, a veteran and pioneer, so I was told, of independent working-class education. The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly for the large and antique ear-trumpet which he applied when straining to catch remarks addressed to him ...”

“... The only woman I have ever known who is a real orator, who has the gift of public persuasion’, Beatrice Webb noted when she met Annie Besant. ‘But to see her speak made me shudder. It is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world.’ Extraordinary ‘self-assurance’ was the quality picked out by Gladstone, when, as prime minister, he took time off to review Besant’s autobiography in 1893 ...”

“... is scarcely borne out by the social identity of its leaders – some of whom, notably O’Connor, Jones and O’Brien, were indisputably middle-class, whilst others like Hetherington, Harney and Lovett became so by a process of upward social mobility. Mrs Thompson claims that ‘the genuinely middle-class Chartists were very few in number’, but she nowhere ...”

“... to seize control of their world. They would be history’s masters, not its victims. Gareth StedmanJones came across Sartre’s writings on Marxism when he was about the same age Sartre had been when he first read Marx. A Francophile in his adolescence, ...”

“... men who have done much to shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth StedmanJones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the ...”

“... the importance of the clitoris, an introduction to a circle of socialists – Robin Blackburn, Gareth StedmanJones, Perry Anderson – who challenged her acceptance of Edward Thompson’s non-sectarian New Left, the frivolity of mascara) came from Bob Rowthorn, who became Rowbotham’s adviser and long-term – oh ...”

“... Italian opposition to Engels around the turn of the century. A useful treatment is that of Gareth StedmanJones, in his contribution ‘Engels and the History of Marxism’ to the volume edited by Hobsbawm. This issue is linked to the first, since those who embrace the Science of Logic also tend to hold that the ...”

“... dangerous and should be finally discredited. Writing about the centenary of the Fabian Society, Gareth StedmanJones recently made the simple yet profound observation that ‘in no other country is it easy to imagine a socialist association able to celebrate a hundred years of continuous existence’ and suggested ...”

“... He argues, in line with other Marxist historians working in this field, like James Hinton and Gareth StedmanJones, that revolutionary class-consciousness can grow out of a struggle for control of production itself. The Leninist model is thus discarded as a schematic imposition of ahistorical categories upon ...”

“... Studies is striking in the light of his innuendoes about Williams’s supposed philistinism). Gareth StedmanJones, one of Inglis’s interviewees, is quoted in the book as complaining of Williams’s ‘sentimentalising’ of the General Strike. I would argue, to the contrary, that in making it the central drama ...”

“... lines used to be uncomplicated, drawing as they did on the Marxist scenario of class struggle – Gareth StedmanJones’s classic Outcast London (1971) was significantly subtitled ‘A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society’. Traditional labour history had no doubts who the heroes and the ...”