“... Economic History Review, and the Sixties saw controversy carried to new heights of fervour by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and by bodies such as the Institute of Economic Affairs. By the mid-Seventies Victorian values were becoming a political football. The Labour movement ‘came into being’, Michael Foot wrote in 1983, ‘to ...”

“... about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her story. The first two-thirds of the book are ...”

“... That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, as his first biographer Edward Thompson described him in 1776, the year of James Barry’s engraving. Andrew Marvell, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1621, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1633 at the age of 12. He left Cambridge in ...”

“... I think they were keen to give it to him in thanks for all he hadn’t written about Queen Mary.’ Macfie’s wife trained in the hotel school at Lausanne and worked at the Balmoral Hotel. Together, they decided to run Heriot Row as a place of corporate hospitality as well as a family home. These days, weddings, funerals and overnight stays add to the ...”

“... looks like a Hong Kong Chinese, the other is Australian, fair, brown and not unlike the actor Jack Thompson who used to figure in sheep-shearing films. I sit and work at my table, where I can hear the murmur of their talk. Then the Australian, slightly reluctantly but egged on by the Chinese, goes over and has a piss in the gateway of number 61. Before they go ...”

“... her costume like a plump English rose trying to play the innkeeper’s wife who turns Joseph and Mary away in a school nativity play. Her role as a dream creature indifferent to the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike demureness, even ...”

“... eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan senior describes himself and his two sons, John Leo and Thomas, as stonecutters. Ten years later, in the 1911 census, he chose the term ‘monumental stonemason’ – the family ...”

“... was the main topic of conversation when a slightly out-of-breath, young upper-class woman called Mary Furness swept in. ‘Sorry for being late,’ she said as she inspected us in turn, looking quizzically at Perry Anderson and at the Black Dwarf people telling Robin off for having sold out by getting married. ‘If you knew where I was yesterday, you’d ...”

“... According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th ...”

“... in this people’s museum, that … generation after generation voted Conservative. What E.P. Thompson described as the ‘flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebian mind’ finds no place here.Heritage, Joyce writes, ‘is for those for whom the past is the same as them, who do not recognise its radical otherness, who do not ...”

“... must have been like all that hot afternoon. She then tells me about a programme on Francis Thompson she’d heard on the wireless, how he had tried to become a priest but had felt he had failed in his vocation, and had become a tramp. Then, unusually, she told me a little of her own life, and how she tried to become a nun on two occasions, had ...”

“... interests them isn’t the rood loft or the pews carved and dated 1641. They are on the trail of Thompson, the woodworker of Kilburn who always carved a mouse on his handiwork. Some of the pews are his, done in the Forties or Fifties, so somewhere here will be a mouse and they scuffle along the pews looking for it. Rather a silly quest, I ...”

“... Tony five times, killing him instantly.An investigation was launched and in February 1993 Noel Thompson, a taxi driver who had driven Tony to the house a few days before his death, and admitted tipping off the IRA, was convicted of conspiracy to murder. ‘Obviously others were involved,’ a detective from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the forerunner to ...”

“... even know where babies come from,’ Carter voices gently, over old frescoes of the Virgin Mary, with hosts of angelic singing. ‘Then came her enlightenment. It seems to have come as something of a shock.’ In​ 1951, Carter passed the 11-plus and won a funded place at Streatham Hill and Clapham High, a girls-only direct-grant grammar school. She ...”

“... Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access public library generates.’ When he jumped over the counter, as it were, things were rather different though father’s footsteps come into this too: it you can’t be a ...”