“... Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or Robert Bly; nor did he adopt the unhinged expressionism of Hunter S. Thompson. He never wanted to build a movement, evangelise for drug use or found a school. Instead, he leaves space for scepticism and the possibility that there’s more than one way of understanding ‘expanded consciousness’. Riddley Walker is where the New ...”

“... put political cartoons on the map. The print-makers of the 1760s had a field-day with a heroic John Wilkes (‘Wilkes and Liberty’) and with Lord Bute as Public Enemy Number One (no fewer than four hundred anti-Bute satires appeared, mainly sporting a jackboot and a petticoat inscribed ‘no petticoat government’, in reference to Bute’s alleged ...”

“... explained by changing economic circumstances that eroded relations between the classes. E.P. Thompson saw them as ‘a characteristic form of social protest’, their anonymity serving as a measure of protection. Many threatened murder, or arson. Cockayne resists Thompson’s analysis, urging the need for a more ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... of its ‘long national tradition’. Sentimentally, he now recalls, they offended patriots (E.P. Thompson especially). ‘Intellectually, they disturbed canonical Marxist opinion, as transmitted from Capital. Politically, they nettled the Labourism of reformists and the ouvriérisme of revolutionaries.’ In the beginning, they recovered two sets of ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recollections. Today Samuel is best known for his work on popular memory and for History Workshop. John Merrick’s new selection of his essays aims to rectify that: it brings together a sample of Samuel’s historical studies, several of which are still thrilling to read, and most of which would have been difficult to get hold of without access to a good ...”

“... it as hard as she does to distinguish motive from method.This approach yields an immediate result. John Ashbery once remarked that he had been sufficiently ‘grabbed and bothered’ by his first sight of Parmigianino’s enigmatic Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to feel that he ought to ‘do something’ about it. Sensing a kindred spirit, Davis squares up ...”

“... he describes, but on the whole he does not approve of them. He finds the Leveller leader John Lilburne ‘long-winded and conceited’; Rainborowe ‘truculent’ and ‘sour’; William Thompson, who fought to a heroic death in the 1649 Leveller mutiny, ‘at bottom was one of those figures who is familiar in all ...”

“... seal-fur sporran, had I been able (aged nine) to find out from such a book as this latest work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF ...”

“... break with Rome. Only one did so outspokenly – and he was rewarded by a martyr’s death. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was executed in June 1535 for refusing (like Thomas More) to take the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to ...”

“... movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and John Chilembwe’s Nyasaland rising of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and the Ghanaian Casely Hayford were able to draw on Homer and the myth of Prester John to build the term into a symbol of ...”

“... In works with titles such as The Occult Philosophy, wise men and magi like Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee outlined in general and axiomatic form the elements of a high and secret knowledge which they claimed to have inherited from the past. This is exactly what O’Keefe has accomplished for his own misty past, instead of Orpheus, Hermes and Simon Magus, we ...”

“... about Vicky, the cartoonist, and two delightful eccentrics, Randolph Churchill and Bonar Thompson, the Hyde Park orator. No one in the Labour Movement disparages Michael Foot as an ‘intellectual’ (the way Crossman and Crosland were disparaged): he is seen rather as everyone’s favourite English master who can win us to new reading, to new ideas ...”