“... was raised by Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State and owner of a large chunk of County Down, and Thomas Miller, Lord Justice Clerk and a custodian of the vast Sutherland estates. Both realised the reverse of the speculative impulses in the Americas: land without labour would produce no income. If people fled from rent-paying in Sutherland to rent-paying in ...”

“... have we, and this was already an old sort of story by the time Plato told it. He has made it seem more real by telling a local, recent version, but he would have known the mythic one quite well: for in the story of Perseus, the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his ...”

“... that has not lightened the burden borne by the Victorians. Professional students of the period are more interested in analysis than judgment and see things differently – but they tend to be out of touch with general opinion. A collection of academic essays on the subject of ‘Victorian values’, first published in 1990, has just been reissued.* It is ...”

“... United States in 1968. One wonders how many rejections this book collected, 13 years ago, or even more recently, from British firms. The present publishers are to be congratulated, the Nobel Prize notwithstanding. The Issa Valley, a minor masterpiece, is even older: it first appeared in Paris, in Polish, in 1955. A new volume of poetry, Bells in ...”

“... to explain this phenomenon than E.P. Thompson himself. But his most recent book (or, more accurately, his hastily-assembled hodgepodge of pamphlets, letters, rejoinders, poems and memoirs) is not an exercise in explanation: it is an exercise in self-indulgence. As a political statement, it adds relatively little to Thompson’s last collection of ...”

“... than the sword, the sharpest pen is surely the cartoonist’s: one palpable hit from him will do more than months of routine pounding from lumbering leader-writers. This may be common knowledge. But is it true? After all, media experts of every hue – and not just those who see the press as the poodle of the powerful – have long been questioning the ...”

“... the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election rhetoric: the loser’s speech of concession, the victor’s magnanimous reply, and the President’s Inaugural Address. This double-edged requirement reflects a traditional tension between the fear that the country is winding ...”

“... Only Lawrence, Larkin’s earliest ‘touchstone against the false’, survives more or less intact. It would be easy enough, then, to argue that – fun and games aside – the really important revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon and recluse, the arch-self-deprecator, was in truth nursing a champ-sized ...”

“... There has never been a ‘Pacificism’ to go with Orientalism, the South Seas having always seemed more luscious than mysterious. The obligations felt by the ‘civilised’ to turn South Sea islanders into something else was too strong for there to be any thought of learning from them, and scholarly encounters seemed a little too hedonist to be serious ...”

“... succeeding generations a legacy of bloodshed and civil strife. Others read in the King’s fate a more personal message. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ the ageing Queen Elizabeth demanded, mindful of her fallen favourite, the Earl of Essex, and his forlorn attempt to rally support for his claim to the throne by staging the tragedy of Richard’s ...”

“... is a remarkable book. I told him it was. Another says I am a conceited prig. I have said as much more than once. A third hints at the writer’s inherent madness. I queried the same possibility.’ When they learned that the death notice was false, critics were aggrieved. But it wasn’t a cheap trick to gain sympathy. Barbellion hadn’t expected to see the ...”

“... If he sometimes appeals to notions of justice, denouncing the wage-relation as ‘robbery’, he more often dismisses moral ideas as ideological baggage, superstructural fictions by which our rulers aim to sweeten their sovereignty. There would be no need for justice in a Communist society, since the very concept implies a scarcity which would have been ...”

“... and a slightly older cabal of Newnham and Somerville graduates already had the leadership of the more sensible constitutionalist wing sewn up. The few elected women in local government were usually middle-aged spinsters with impressive records of voluntary work; even when suffrage was granted and a few women entered parliament, they rarely gained admittance ...”

“... at Bielefeld University on the Nazi policy of killing off the mentally ill ascribed the murder of more than a hundred thousand psychiatric patients by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German ...”

“... to describe her), and postwar baby boomers (as I almost was), need I think to place that euphoria more firmly than we did at the time in the context of the Second World War. We were the children of that war. And it was the direness of the 1950s for women, another backlash after the war’s liberating potential, which precipitated the feminism that was to ...”