“... witchcraft and have been assimilated in the more recent works by historians like Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane. No apology is needed for their rehearsal here since, despite (or perhaps because of) their classic status, they are regularly misrepresented even by anthropologists who should know better. Jeanne Favret-Saada’s foray into contemporary ...”

“... if they take on all exceptions to their rule. Inspired by their reading of social anthropology, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas explained the increase in accusations of witchcraft in early modern England as a result of late 16th-century social and economic change. Steadily, though, incongruent cases gathered in drifts, even though there was only a ...”

“... less apparent in the work of the supposedly High Tory Jonathan Clark or the proto-Thatcherite Alan Macfarlane as in the Marxist historians whom they attack. There are now a dozen or more learned journals devoted to it – Past and Present, Social History, History Workshop Journal, Llafur, Gender and History to name but a few. (Rural History, due out ...”

“... January, Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant at Ingleton.‘Hello, Mr Redhead, this is Alan Bennett. I’m wanting some coal.’‘Goodness me! I am consorting with higher beings!’Last time I rang Mr Redhead he said: ‘Well, I don’t care how celebrated you are, you’ll never be a patch on your dad.’ I remind him of this.‘That’s correct ...”

“... to – Britain’s own commercial history.’ Indian tea was imperial tea. ‘Without tea,’ Alan and Iris Macfarlane wrote in Green Gold: The Empire of Tea, ‘the British Empire and British industrialism could not have emerged.’† Ellis and his co-authors do not say anything quite so stark but much in their book ...”

“... The Statute of Merton (1235) guarantees the lord of the manor’s right to enclose common land. Alan Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism confirms the view that private ownership and alienation of land had always been features of the English scene as far back as records go. Sir Keith Joseph’s delight on discovering ...”

“... a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an actor; and ...”