“... In her subtitle, Steedman claims to illuminate ‘the making of modern England’. She takes E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class as a reference point, suggesting that Thompson – influenced by Adam Smith and Marx’s dismissal of domestic service as unproductive labour – thought he could write a history ...”

“... in this people’s museum, that … generation after generation voted Conservative. What E.P. Thompson described as the ‘flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebian mind’ finds no place here.Heritage, Joyce writes, ‘is for those for whom the past is the same as them, who do not recognise its radical otherness, who do not ...”

“... had been coerced by Jacob Bronowski (a Cambridge scientist/poet of an earlier generation) and E.P. Thompson (in Witness against the Beast). Ackroyd’s life of Blake had to ease him away from all that, portraying a wilfully obtuse man, with his spites and his angels. He is ticked off for ‘raging in a darkened room’ and not networking his career to greater ...”

“... can. Although she doesn’t make the claim herself, her book can be seen as a complement to E.P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. ‘We have to make up our minds about William Morris,’ Thompson said. ‘Either he was an eccentric, isolated figure, personally admirable, but whose major thought was ...”

“... It is beautifully produced, but falls short of the scholarship of works in this area by F.M.L. Thompson, Mark Girouard and Brent Elliott, to which it owes a great deal. The text represents an extensive trawl of material, which is presented in the form of a verbal scrapbook covering a range of topics, under headings such as ...”

“... political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal. From the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to Waterloo in 1815, Britain faced a ...”

“... puts the legendary working-class male who stars as the heroic protagonist in what she calls E.P. Thompson’s ‘melodrama’ firmly in his place: ‘the fatal flaws of misogyny and patriarchy,’ she concludes, ‘ultimately muted the radicalism of the British working class.’ The old idols are not all they seemed and the vicarious sympathies of ...”

“... Marxism secure in its own theoretical rigour.’ I assume this is a joke. He then recites E.P. Thompson’s attack on Althusser’s position, takes a look at Saussurian linguistics, and Perry Anderson’s attack on the structuralist habit of invoking Saussure to explain ‘all manner of cultural phenomena’: but in the end he arrives where he ...”

“... was surprised in turn to learn that Morris had been ‘a craftsman as well as a writer’. E.P. Thompson’s superb study of 1955, which established the fierce cogency of Morris’s Marxism, dismissed most of his verse as the ‘poetry of escape’. The romances moved him to ask whether ‘Morris had gone soft in the head.’ In our consumerist culture, he ...”

“... being.The case of Ecuador, and the role of its Supreme Court in particular, put me in mind of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters (1975), his account of the Black Act of 1723 which criminalised and imposed harsh penalties on those found guilty of various acts of hunting, fishing and destruction of property. The act was a response to a proliferation of these ...”

“... gerund title word is ‘making’. Something has happened to ‘making’, though, since E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s title tells us that his subject is a discrete historical process, class-making. In the book, he’ll specify the large forces at work in that making ...”

“... Although quite different in mode and scale, in power nothing like it has appeared since E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. In fact, it could well have been called The Unmaking and Remaking of the Chinese Working Class. The product of seven years’ research and interview work on the ground, it is an ethnographic and analytic ...”

“... hats.’ In addition to resembling – a bit too perfectly – Dupont and Dupond, aka Thomson and Thompson, long-running comic foils to Tintin, the twins had a background that Hergé never spoke of. They’d been born out of wedlock, father unknown, and treated kindly, six years later, by a countess who hired their mother as a chambermaid at a grand estate ...”