Mere Party
Robert Stewart, 22 January 1987
A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and constitutional history.