“... the cost of staging City of Drama 1994. Celebrities were introduced and speeches were made. Mr Gil Thompson, Chief Executive of Manchester Airport, cited James Agate, Asa Briggs and J.B. Priestley on the splendours of Manchester’s cultural past. Mr Thompson didn’t quote Engels. Nor, understandably, ...”

“... rival for class valedictorian. She introduced him to her favourite English poets: Sidney, Spenser, John Clare. When he was unhappy at Dartmouth (he found all the hazing and fraternity business childish), he buried himself in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.He had begun writing verse by the time he dropped out and returned home in November 1892, having lasted less ...”

“... is not inconsistent to recognise that an old enemy is no longer such a danger as an old ally. E.P. Thompson would like Cobbett to have a stricter political theory. He wrote in 1965: ‘Cobbett helped to create and nourish the anti-intellectualism and the theoretical opportunism (masked as “practical” empiricism) which has remained an important ...”

“... reggae music, multi-media happenings, what have you. But bless me, it seems I was wrong. For if John Gross isn’t duplicating for a later generation what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such ...”

“... There is a brief life of Butchell in the first Dictionary of National Biography; it was written by Thompson Cooper, who had an eye for such characters, and who contributed over 1400 biographies, more than anyone else to the original dictionary. Cooper made no claims for Butchell’s importance as a physician, or as an innovator in the history of ...”

“... what it is like to be a child, though the occasional exceptions – Dickens, Orwell and Flora Thompson – sketch in the outline of this vast unexplored continent. Perhaps this is one reason why historians have so rarely written about childhood. And even if they do write about it – when discussing the history of education, for example – they often ...”

“... E.P. Thompson called it the ‘Natopolitan’ world: that is, not just Nato plus all the Cold War military and political institutions that were integral to it, but also a mentality whose web extended over a lot more activity and thought, even in the minds of individuals, than anyone at the time had suspected. Of course there were the revelations in the mid-Sixties about Encounter and the CIA, and later in the US and Britain a stream of disclosures about covert counter-insurgency in every form, from secretly underwritten academic research to assassinations and mass killings ...”

“... It is beautifully produced, but falls short of the scholarship of works in this area by F.M.L. Thompson, Mark Girouard and Brent Elliott, to which it owes a great deal. The text represents an extensive trawl of material, which is presented in the form of a verbal scrapbook covering a range of topics, under headings such as ...”

“... Peculiar alliances are struck over this dislike, most notably between Taylor himself and E.P. Thompson. The two men united in their pronouncements as to the emptiness of Carpenter’s ‘individualism’, the weedy, private-income vegetarianism that he embodied, the hopeless blend of mysticism and retreatism that took the place of politics. The now ...”

“... I don’t think they flow from his religious commitment. In giving his own interpretation of John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Faith and Reason’, MacIntyre says: It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to ...”

“... of years, when the people’s most elemental needs were in jeopardy, is minutely investigated by John Bohstedt. His method has been to scrutinise ‘an objective sample’ of the more than a thousand riots that broke out during 1790-1810, in order to discover how and why they occurred. They were too commonplace to be unduly upsetting, and it was rarely that ...”

“... his own political views. More significant to Edwards’s politics was his marriage by 1694 to Mary Thompson, stepdaughter and heir of the Catholic printer Nathaniel Thompson, at a time when a crackdown on Jacobite printing was devastating the underground press. There was now a gap in the market and Edwards had his ...”

“... what she is.’ Sartre, wearing a suit on the beach at Copacabana, looks dreary beside her. John Updike in his dull dad jumper feels like a token inclusion, Hunter S. Thompson naturally stands out. His Hawaiian shirts and safari suits became so recognisable that Gary Trudeau turned him into the demonic Uncle Duke of ...”

“... absolutely. You can see why Mayan experts, the domineering and wrong-headed Englishman Sir Eric Thompson in particular, resisted interpretations that had them dealing with less than transcendental matters, religious, mythological or astronomical; it turned out, however, that glyphs might also record items of local history, the dates and triumphs over ...”

“... his script sounds like an awkward adaptation of the ‘Two Americas’ routine deployed in 2008 by John Edwards (who showed that a genuine sex scandal comes with a divorce, a love child and a near-miss at a thirty-year jail sentence). Between Quinn and de Blasio is the mild-mannered, African-American Bill Thompson, a former ...”