“... online shaming have grown enormously. In 2012, when a friend of a charity worker called Lindsey Stone posted a photograph of her on Facebook raising her middle finger and pretending to yell at a ‘Silence and Respect’ sign in Arlington National Cemetery, the Twittersphere responded: ‘hope this cunt gets raped and stabbed.’ ‘Fuck You ...”

“... of the mass of the population. No one can read Quaife’s book and still believe that. Lawrence Stone could surely not have written as he did in his Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 if he had had that knowledge of the really telling evidence which Quaife thinks he should have had. The other error which he attacks is the idea that the triumph of ...”

“... own defence of publishing so many of Cromwell’s letters in his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) is pertinent: If each Letter look dim, and have little light, after all study; – yet let the Historical reader reflect, such light as it has cannot be disputed at all. These words, expository of that day and hour, ...”

“... Christopher Hitchens may not be ‘the nearest thing to a one-man band since I.F. Stone laid down his pen’, but he comes close. For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others ...”

“... image, every shadow still imprinted on my memory, seemed both homely and exotic. Tethered to the stone wall, next to the manger, was what I recognised as a white-faced Hereford cow, like those which grazed around the farm where I was growing up. The incongruity was normal. Places I saw in my Bible (‘A Fountain at Nazareth’, ‘Road from Jerusalem to ...”

“... an angry crowd demanding lower food prices and an end to the war with France. It was probably a stone, but the king and his government chose to believe it was a bullet, and used the occasion to introduce new legislation which, among other things, increased the penalty for seditious libel and put severe restrictions on the meetings of the popular societies ...”

“... in ancient paganism by the veneration of nature. Although the original purpose of the menhirs and stone circles scattered through the landscape remains obscure, it seems clear that the religion (or religions) of the ancient Britons revolved around topographical features and open-air enclosures. Many of these sites were taken over by the Christians, in a ...”

“... religions; and the changes from one practice to another, like the change from long barrows to stone circles, or the later and sudden abandonment of henges, even the ‘superhenges’ that had taken a huge amount of labour to create, may have been the result of upheavals fully as great as the conversions of pagan Celts and Anglo-Saxons to ...”

“... does the institution, despite or because of all this, serve any useful purpose? Professor Lawrence Stone, in his London Review review of Cannadine’s book, says that paradoxically ‘in this age of mass democracy and party rule, the only feeble defence of individual liberty and the public interest against the tyranny of a prime minister is that long-derided ...”

“... takes the same high tone of judicial detachment. He sounds like Solomon, Cato the Elder and Oliver Wendell Holmes all rolled into one. Levin likes nothing better than to hand down a ruling. But although it is probably true that the majority of the public would be furious if Myra Hindley were released, it is unlikely that their desire to keep her locked ...”

“... glory of their Ozymandias-like hubris (Shelley, incidentally, only got a measly Poets’ Corner stone tablet, alongside Keats, in 1954). Much of the wealth that paid for them was accumulated through imperial wars and colonies – the abbey is still ‘the Commonwealth church’ – and unlike the furniture in a National Trust property, none of it can be ...”

“... sources. Reading MacQueen and Cann, I was sadly reminded of some remarks made by Roland Oliver. Looking back in 1997 over his long and influential career of academic and practical innovation in African historiography, Oliver felt obliged to note that ‘Europe seemed to be turning increasingly inwards’ to the ...”

“... another children’s series about a secret pagan society embedded within an isolated village; The Stone Tape (1972), a Nigel Kneale-scripted story about a building whose very fabric retains sinister memories; and Penda’s Fen (1974), a collaboration between David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of ...”

“... the Earl of Sandwich, for an extra-marital affair which threatened his career. He kept pictures of Oliver Cromwell among his collection of images of the kings and queens of England, and yet late in life was accused of Popery and Jacobitism. He radically reformed the administration of the Navy by labouring (often) from four in the morning until the middle of ...”