“... evidence of stupidity on hand – and none more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than ...”

“... of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.)Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for his classes. His wife ...”

“... and Thackeray became journalists as well. Bored with running newspapers, G.W.M. Reynolds and Mark Lemon turned their hand to penny dreadfuls and comedies. The deregulation of the London stage in 1843 meant that actors, managers and playwrights competed for ever-growing theatrical audiences. And the great schism in the Scottish churches, the fall-out from ...”

“... new historicism have been exceptionally unwilling to stand together for a team photograph – the mark of the movement is the disavowal of movements. These two authors opt for the lower case: not New Historicism, but new historicism. The house journal Representations, founded in 1983 and still going strong, included in its first issue no editorial statement ...”

“... and likes, all of whom he assumes are repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have and a masculine ideal he can’t measure up to. Poer’s face is smooth where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is ...”

“... astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public transport and geriatric care. (A key influence on the latter was the suffering of his grandfather, who had had to move into care when Blunkett’s mother could no longer cope with looking after ...”

“... life of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and disappointments. Only in retrospect do we understand that it has ...”

“... the more exacting erudition of Propp’s morphology of the folk tale and the work of Aarne and Thompson. She is neither populariser nor pedant, but she fears the commercialism by which traditional stories can be coarsened and falsified. ‘This is not the legitimate spontaneous growth which we find in stories handed down from father to son or in customs ...”

“... to be sure, but not one that’s likely to be welcome in her scholarly middle years as the mark she will have made on the world. As both a lover of truth, and a misunderstood victim of a cover-up by powerful men to protect each other, she aims to set the record straight with her recollection of the events of the Profumo Affair. Christine Keeler bemoans ...”

“... not every intellectual has been comfortable when arguing against extreme positions, or when the mark of approval goes only to those with average views. Take the case of R.G. Collingwood, who had no radio or television career and did not write for the newspapers, who was an exceptional scholar and philosopher, but who never lived up to his own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... major reasons the First World War turned out as bloody as it did. Lord Salisbury was nearer the mark with his back-handed compliment to Hiram Maxim at a dinner held to honour him in London in 1900: ‘I consider Mr Maxim to be one of the greatest benefactors the world has ever known.’ How so? the puzzled gunmaker asked. ‘Well, I should say that you have ...”

“... not all the accounts of the later years of married life are so gloomy,’ seems wide of the mark, since no gloom is in evidence. At times the authors remind me of a hearty young woman on a P&O ship whose job was to jolly passengers into abandoning their chairs, where they were contentedly snoozing or reading, and throwing themselves into healthy deck ...”

“... naive to take all the noise about feeling at face value, and constant exhortations to sympathy may mark its absence as much as its presence, or at least an anxiety that benevolence was fragile and fleeting. There’s no need, after all, to display notices forbidding spitting unless people are spitting a lot, and by the same token ‘the strident reforming ...”

“... is a careful, rather tedious study of minutiae about provisions, discipline, artillery etc. Mark Kishlansky’s The Rise of the New Model Army was published in 1979, the first year of the Thatcher Government, an appropriate time for his revelation that there was nothing very political about the New Model and indeed nothing very revolutionary about the ...”