“... having this undistinguished and limited-minded German bourgeois to be its social sovereign,’ Beatrice Webb noted as she watched him dole out prizes to London schoolchildren four years before he became king. Henry James was equally unimpressed by the accession of this ‘arch-vulgarian’. But Bertie turned out to be very good at the rigmarole and ...”

“... to do with how people respond to particular ways of framing the issue of poverty: one study by the Beatrice Webb Society in 2016 found that terms like ‘benefits’ and indeed ‘poverty’ left people cold; ‘fairness’, on the other hand, struck a chord in ‘a nation that prides itself on fair play’. Whether this is a cause or an effect of media ...”

“... felt guilty, not complacent, about their privilege; bedevilled by a ‘consciousness of sin’, as Beatrice Webb put it, they turned to ‘social science’ to understand and then tackle the misery they saw around them. In the process, they created the field of social policy, but they also remade liberalism. A school of thought born to open up a society ...”

“... He often attacked left-leaning academics and ‘fellow-travellers’ of the 1930s like Sidney and Beatrice Webb or the American journalist Walter Duranty, ‘who for one reason or another wished to deceive or be deceived’ about the Soviet Union and thus abetted Soviet misinformation. He saw the 1970s ‘revisionists’ in Sovietology as direct ...”

“... Whitechapel had an unusual mix of races and nationalities. Margaret Harkness, novelist, cousin of Beatrice Webb and East End charity worker, described a Saturday night on Whitechapel Road in the late 1880s. One sees all nationalities. A grinning Hottentot elbows his way through a crowd of long-eyed Jewesses. An Algerian merchant walks arm-in-arm with a ...”

“... is celebratory and descends from early historians of the trade-union movement like Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Trade-unionism, on this view, represented the essence of the working-class experience, and an institutional approach to labour history was thus legitimised. The growth of trade-union organisation, and ultimately of the Labour Party, was seen ...”

“... periodical in 1902, his commitment to the Working Men’s College in London, his being seen by Beatrice Webb as the rising hope of political Liberalism, and his refusal to be Director of the London School of Economics in 1908. If he turned to books rather than practical politics, it was because his political analysis laid down that books were ...”

“... the contrary, something about him apart from his wealth and glamour instantly aroused suspicion. Beatrice Webb called him the most brilliant man in the Commons, but argued that ‘so much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.’ F.E. Smith, another unscrupulous chancer whom Mosley idolised, called him ‘the perfumed popinjay of scented ...”

“... and Dudley Ward toured the West Country in a caravan, speaking on the subject on village greens. Beatrice Webb, however, was one of the few not to fall for Brooke’s charms. ‘There was a remarkable scene,’ Strachey wrote of one Fabian Summer School, ‘in which Rupert and I tried to explain [the philosopher G.E.] Moore’s ideas to Mrs ...”

“... four children. They became known as a couple at Westminster and were ‘passionately attached’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary, adding that ‘the scenes in the House of Commons when the rather unattractive wife appears and insists on taking possession of her husband and ignoring his friend, are a source of scandal in the Party.’ Lee was in love ...”

“... read mathematics and classics, he took up research among the poor in London’s East End. He knew Beatrice Webb, who, in 1909, was the first person to put the case for a free state medical service available to all. Some saw him as a kind and humane public servant; others as a vain, mean-spirited bureaucrat. He could be very odd, and once tried to ...”

“... philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald, who was, as Delany describes her, ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell, Beatrice Webb, A.S. Neill and Margot Asquith, all rolled into one’. Schwarzwald surrounded herself with a hand-picked group of youngsters who were invited to spend their holidays in her country house, which she ran like a summer camp. It was at her ...”

“... my path across life as one treads a path across the fields.’ She recorded a visit to Sidney and Beatrice Webb: those entirely integrated people. Their secret is that they have by nature no divisions of soul to fritter them away: their impact is solid and authentic ... On a steely watery morning we swiftly tramped over a heathy common ...”

“... most exciting spectacle of the evolutionary, emergent spirit of man’ since the Reformation. Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the same year believed that they saw being erected ‘a shining example of socialism in a single country’, extorting admiration whereas previously everything the USSR attempted was pronounced by ...”

“... Britain’s densely-researched book is a revised doctoral dissertation which views the Webbs with Webb-like detachment: Young’s account is longer but also slighter – an affectionate (if faintly equivocal) survey by an Old Dartingtonian, who knew both Elmhirsts well, and is himself a trustee of the school. As Britain explains, the Fabians have usually been ...”