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“... killing cats on such a scale uproariously funny (when other people in 18th-century England, as Keith Thomas has shown us, thought throwing bread to wild birds in winter a sign of humanity) compels recognition of the many-textured density of what we call culture, high or low. Take the apparently familiar case of the child’s fairy-tale. In an essay ...”

“... of a single Annales historian. Since then, and despite the achievements of Hobsbawm, Hilton, Hill, Keith Thomas and E.P. Thompson, it has still been possible for Geoffrey Barraclough in Main Trends in History to surmise that ‘if a consensus were taken today it would almost certainly show that the majority of professional historians is sceptical of, if ...”

“... Keith Douglas was 24 when he was killed in action, in 1944, and although quite a few of his poems had by then appeared in anthologies and magazines, he was not generally thought of as a significant ‘war poet’. But then, who was? ‘Where are the war poets?’ was a familiar journalistic cry from 1939 to 1945, and few answers were forthcoming ...”

“... their rivals. The result is extraordinary and often depressing. ‘Unexpected disasters,’ Keith Thomas wrote in Religion and the Decline of Magic, ‘the sudden death of a child, the loss of a cow, the failure of some routine household task – all could, in default of any more obvious explanation, be attributed to the influence of some ...”

“... Roy Jenkins and John Fleming about New Labour’s attitude to Oxbridge. I describe having run into Keith Thomas in Oxford a few weeks ago, who was very funny about the dons all busily transferring their assets into their wives’ names in the expectation that their world will shortly be coming to an end. Roy says that some of Blair’s ...”

“... heart for every fate’: the title Marchand has chosen, from the enchanting lyric Byron wrote to Thomas Moore in 1817, doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It would have been better to borrow Doris Langley Moore’s Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, for in these months in Genoa (October 1822 – June 1823) Byron was settling his accounts with his creditors, with ...”

“... the mood of the novel remarkably well, even though the sex and violence have been toned down, and Keith, the hideous, hapless dwarf, is taller on screen than the 4'11" he rises to on the page – nearer, in fact, to the 5'6" he considers the boundary between short and tall, which also happens to be the height, according to Experience, of Amis himself. Marsh ...”

“... classes’. The source of this accolade is, rather hilariously, the Daily Mail. Also left out is Keith Flett, veteran man of letters (see page 4) and socialist antidote to the Daily Mail as well as just about everything in Brewer’s Modern, who has edited a collection of essays, endorsed by Eric Hobsbawm, called The 20th Century: A Century of Wars and ...”

“... Other essays include a splendid job by John Algeo routing some linguistic myths on tag questions, Keith Thomas on how to end a letter, and Enoch Powell on the relationship between the decline of the classics and that of grammar. A short, bad-tempered article by Kingsley Amis complaining of the ignorance, misuse and misprision of language nowadays is ...”

“... had done, the buildings would not have held them. Did they manage without religion? Did they, as Keith Thomas has taught us, adhere to pagan superstitions and practices? Collinson, acknowledging these possibilities, thinks that historians may still have underestimated the hold of an ‘inarticulate and undemonstrative’ Anglicanism. It is ‘very ...”

“... regularly pressed: Nicholas Malebranche (b. 1638), to be inserted between Leibniz and Locke; and Thomas Reid (1710-96), best inserted between Hume and Kant rather than between Berkeley and Hume, on the grounds that his major works are a response to Hume, who was his junior by exactly one year.Rebounding passionately from Hume, Reid founded the Scottish ...”

“... Arcadia. Shakespeare complete. Raleigh’s History of the World. Bacon complete. The Bible. Sir Thomas Browne complete. Milton, including the prose works. Cowley, Waller and Denham. Dryden, including the prose works and the translations. Samuel Butler complete. Pope complete, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Addison complete. Steele complete. Swift ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... is that while it has not greatly changed the outlines of the story as told by Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas and a succession of memoirists, it begins to make possible a different type of account. It is only a beginning because the parallel French, Israeli, Egyptian and even, with very considerable exceptions, American papers are either not yet available or not ...”

“... followed that, dark shapes swinging among the beams. So it is not like Otley which just nurtured Thomas Chippendale who made chairs. No, we are not a serious people, as how should we be? Espiessac, 26 August. After years of sniggering English tourists having themselves photographed next to the town sign, the burghers of Condom have at last woken up to the ...”