“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with the ...”

“... to publish a definitive, ten-volume edition of Burke’s correspondence, supervised by the late Thomas Copeland. And since 1981, the Clarendon Press has been publishing Burke’s writings and speeches under the overall editorship of Paul Langford, the first systematically new edition since that compiled between 1792 and 1827. No one reading these genuinely ...”

“... Palestine Liberation Organisation as the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, to mis-spell hostage Thomas Sutherland’s name as Southerland, to refer to the ‘terrorist bombings’ at Rome and Vienna Airports when in fact they were shootings. At least he does not make President Reagan’s mistake of the time – which was to refer absentmindedly to the ...”

“... forger called Gabriel Varney, who was reworked from elements in the life of the forger-poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Bulwer-Lytton was the most distinguished of the sensationally popular Newgate novelists. His closest rival, Harrison Ainsworth, managed nothing more than romantic escapism with a thick accretion of historical allusions. Bulwer-Lytton ...”

“... the minister in charge of the coal industry, was ‘a second-rate, slow-witted sheepshead’. Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Labour MP, was ‘only a walking corpse, with a faint residue of mental trouble’. The Labour peer Lord Faringdon was ‘a pansy pacifist of whose private tendencies it might be slander to speak freely’. So much for personal spite. On ...”

“... of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and Maitland’s famous essay on ‘Memoranda de Parliamento 1305’ calls ...”

“... almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century efflorescence is Stair, whose Institutions captivate by their simple ...”

“... of the annus mirabilis, 1650, with its heresiarchs, prophets and messiahs, with John Robins and Thomas Tany, with its ‘witchcraft fits’ and speaking with tongues, provided the odium of example which sobriety needed. Davis has therefore written a book which is silly and unnecessary. No one has ever pretended that the Ranters were organised, as ...”

“... has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a line in sarky parenthesis – on such things as William Davenant’s pox-rotted nose – worthy of a stand-up comedian. Although it will find a home in that dreariest of Dewey Decimal deserts – the public reference section – this book is fun. But it will not help the ambitious undergraduate pass his/her ...”

“... of London, of which Pyne wrote part, was dominated by the illustrations of A.C. Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson. In so far as it has an authorial voice it is that of the publisher Rudolph Ackermann among whose many inventions The Microcosm could also be counted as the first coffee-table book, published from 1808 to 1810 for a polite but not exclusively ...”

“... entrée to great households, and could be induced to spy on their patrons. Marlowe’s patron was Thomas Walsingham, the great spymaster’s nephew. Beyond this, he had the friendship of powerful men. One was Lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby. He belonged to the Stanley family, whose power-base was in Lancashire, a part of England famous for clinging to ...”

“... ideological weapons against Russian ‘barbarism’ and the ‘superficial’ British and French. Thomas Mann’s Observations of a Non-Political Man, published in 1916, is the prize exhibit of historians concerned to pin down this pattern of thinking. The same mental set has often been viewed as an important enabling element in the coming of National ...”

“... debate seems quaint and unpromising, as if he hadn’t heard of recent developments. His target is Thomas Kuhn, and he wants to rebut the claim that the history of science is punctuated by Kuhnian revolutions. Kuhn’s famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions contains a final, worried, chapter, in which he tries to find a viable conception of scientific ...”

“... wasn’t unprecedented: Lincoln presented the arguments of the Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison in the 1836 presidential campaign.) In a 1948 primary campaign, Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey debated the outlawing of the American Communist Party on national radio. The idea of a televised ...”