“... among historians who have written principally on British topics – nothing from Linda Colley or Quentin Skinner, for example – and some of the best-known contemporary exponents of biography have not contributed: there is no Peter Ackroyd, no Hermione Lee, no Victoria Glendinning, though there are three entries by Claire Tomalin, including Katherine ...”

“... us to discover it. Attention (of the sort fostered by intellectual historians like Thomas Kuhn and Quentin Skinner) to the vocabularies in which sentences are formulated, rather than to individual sentences, makes us realise, for example, that the fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that ...”

“... familiarity with the structures of argument prescribed by legal rhetoricians is the subject of Quentin Skinner’s meticulously documented Forensic Shakespeare.* Skinner describes his book as ‘a supplement’ to Burrow’s; but its approach to Shakespeare is of a confessedly un-literary character. Indeed Forensic ...”

“... as part of a significantly different and altogether more radical set of conversations. But it was Quentin Skinner’s work on Leviathan that transformed Laslett’s attention to circumstantial detail into a full-blown methodology. Skinner placed the text in the immediate context of its publication, as justifying ...”

“... that can be conditioned by repeated exposure to external stimuli.The behaviourism of B.F. Skinner was part of the lingua franca of 1950s America that Dahl absorbed. Some version of it underlay his effort to retrain his wife in the art of speech. It also lies beneath his early children’s fiction. Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ...”