“... term the ‘anti-condescensionists’: that great parade of researchers who, inspired by E.P. Thompson, have set out to rescue not just the poor stockinger or Luddite but the homeopath and the spiritualist, the dress reformer and, now, the anti-vaccinationist, from that much quoted ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. She is out to recover and ...”

“... could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms. We are a long way from Tacitus, upon whom time has taken its revenge by ...”

“... amour propre to have been Mata Hari than a party girl who bedded Tory peers and the slum landlord Peter Rachman (‘I never knew about the terror tactics with tenants who didn’t pay rent or were difficult . . . There was something deeply hurt in him from the beatings in the concentration camps and he would never ever get over it’). She is enraged that ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... is not inconsistent to recognise that an old enemy is no longer such a danger as an old ally. E.P. Thompson would like Cobbett to have a stricter political theory. He wrote in 1965: ‘Cobbett helped to create and nourish the anti-intellectualism and the theoretical opportunism (masked as “practical” empiricism) which has remained an important ...”

“... disordered’. It was only restored to historical importance in the 1960s, in particular by E.P. Thompson, who insisted in The Making of the English Working Class that Despard’s trial and execution were ‘an incident of real significance in British political history’. Within the revolutionary tradition that ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... Ovett style of things) as a ‘cabaret dancer’. Above all, Coe has been coached by his father, Peter, who has impressed himself on the public mind, rightly or wrongly, as a self-made authoritarian gifted with inflexible will, prescient ambition and a strikingly neo-Victorian belief in ‘scientific’ progress. It comes as no surprise to learn from the new ...”

“... the early graduates of Cambridge English, [D.W.] Harding, [L.C.] Knights, Q.D. Leavis and [Denys] Thompson – five authors who, in aggregate, wrote on virtually every topic that Scrutiny ever discussed. The second Scrutiny generation, led by [R.G.] Cox and Ford, was markedly more restricted in range.’ Ford and his like (according to Mulhern) worked through ...”

“... convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891. Her father, Peter Walker, was Black and came from the Danish West Indies; her mother, Marie, was a white Danish immigrant. Walker disappeared soon after Nella’s birth. Her mother then married a fellow Danish immigrant who never accepted his mixed-race stepdaughter. Nella ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... they knew their stuff. Mary Dawdon of Masham in Yorkshire gave eleven pounds of yarn to James Thompson in August 1695, but when he returned the finished product she was sure he had cheated her. ‘[It] being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … ...”

“... the sickliness of this has been recognised and condemned. It was one of the Leavisites – Denys Thompson, I believe – who put the boot in on the Essays of Elia; and this was one of the Leavisite demolition-jobs that truly cleared a space, and let the air in, for a more than academic public. John Gross, though he dutifully and unavoidably finds space for ...”

“... Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having already produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and ...”