“... incarnate the ‘spirit of the age’ than the less ‘establishment’ A.J.P. Taylor or E.P. Thompson? Annan contrasted the reformist commitments of ‘our age’ with the homosexuality and communism of the Cambridge spies, but weren’t Gilbert Murray and Arnold Toynbee more representative interwar figures and just as ‘incorporated’ as their postwar ...”

“... a German-controlled Europe made such detachment harder to sustain. As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly ...”

“... of him without a glow of patriotism ... ’ ‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’ howls Christopher Hitchens in a New Statesman philippic against Foot. Hitchens would rather examine Russell coolly, drily, as an international philosopher and political thinker. But Foot’s rich, exaggerative style does, undeniably, mirror his subject’s. Russell ...”

“... hats.’ In addition to resembling – a bit too perfectly – Dupont and Dupond, aka Thomson and Thompson, long-running comic foils to Tintin, the twins had a background that Hergé never spoke of. They’d been born out of wedlock, father unknown, and treated kindly, six years later, by a countess who hired their mother as a chambermaid at a grand estate ...”

“... and untrustworthy, selfish and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When ...”

“... popular movement – threw that group into crisis and most of Hobsbawm’s fellow-travellers (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) left the party then or soon afterwards. Hobsbawm did not, concluding that the Soviet invasion, however agonising, was a necessary step in light of the danger of counter-revolution: ‘If we had been ...”

“... the history of British espionage can senior ministers have got their hands quite so dirty. As E.P. Thompson grudgingly conceded in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... shared in government, whether by royal appointment or congenital right. According to I.A.A. Thompson, the favourite, or valido as he was known in Spain, on which Thompson is an authority, emerged ‘at a particular moment in the development of the central administration’. He represented ‘a window of transition ...”

“... in the Cabinet. It was this split in function within the landed classes that helped to nourish Christopher Wyvill’s economical reform movement in the 1770s (based in Yorkshire, just adjacent to the Alkincoats estate). Here, as on other occasions, lesser gentry combined with mercantile dissidents in a critique of the 18th-century state because, at the ...”

“... Maugham enjoyed a ‘firm friendship’, described him as ‘an extremely mysterious character’; Christopher Isherwood likened him to a Gladstone bag: ‘God only knows what is inside.’ (Maugham said much the same about Isherwood.) In contrast to his reserve in company, however, Maugham was addicted in his writing to self-disclosure: ‘Most of what one ...”

“... The crude conviction that theory was antithetical to research is captured in his remark that Christopher Hill – master of Balliol in Cobb’s time – was ‘not really MY sort of historian. He has IDEAS and he does not really like ARCHIVES.’ The hermeneutical bent of much Continental and American historical writing left him cold. ‘Soon,’ he ...”

“... was not to know, in 1989, that she has yet to become a wasm in 2013. In August of the same year, Christopher Hitchens argued that Brown had underrated her in his recent book about her. Credibility ‘operates to the benefit of the people who really mean what they say, which is why the facts of life have been Tory for so long.’ The electorate was presently ...”

“... to steal, and is told he is destined to hang. Dickie has little time for the Marxism of the E.P. Thompson era, but many of these (uniformly unfunny) courtroom jests recall the world of Albion’s Fatal Tree, with its smug, self-interested judges and their crushing response to property crime. Wit usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate ...”

“... aren’t they? Are they? A generation ago, the historians E.J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E.P. Thompson demonstrated that even rioting crowds are ‘not fickle, peculiarly irrational, or generally given to bloody attacks on persons’. Their conclusions have been confirmed by three decades of historical case-studies of violent crowds in England, Europe and ...”