“... the history of British espionage can senior ministers have got their hands quite so dirty. As E.P. Thompson grudgingly conceded in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, ...”

“... the calm-of-mind, all-passion-spent vision of India found years ago in the gentle novels of Edward Thompson (father of E.P. Thompson) such as An Indian Day and The End of the Hours.One of the best summings-up of how things were and are is given in the deceptively simple concluding sentence of The Siege of Krishnapur. The ...”

“... body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of the ...”

“... rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent biography of Samuel from 2017, was already ...”

“... taking his displacement from the board of New Left Review in 1963 with the good grace that E.P. Thompson, for example, seems to have found difficult to muster. With the Sixties Williams embarked decisively on a career as a political writer which he pursued until his death. Really, one feels, his heart was always in the politics of what he wrote about ...”

“... how our intellectuals have been corrupted by the cult of ‘greatness’ (a swipe at E.P. Thompson here), how, in a thousand ways, the culture tries to see things from the royals’ view down – but, since we can’t be in their position, how the thing becomes contorted and crippled, decked out with a bogus ‘pageantry’, itself a key, ritualised ...”

“... of a dissident news-sheet, the Reasoner, crudely stencilled, as Macleod says, but inspired by E.P. Thompson and his fellow historian John Saville. (I was a camp follower.) Its third issue argued that if all the Communist Parties had banded together against intervention, it might have been averted. We wrote a joint letter to the New Statesman to make our view ...”

“... Since then, and despite the achievements of Hobsbawm, Hilton, Hill, Keith Thomas and E.P. Thompson, it has still been possible for Geoffrey Barraclough in Main Trends in History to surmise that ‘if a consensus were taken today it would almost certainly show that the majority of professional historians is sceptical of, if not positively hostile ...”

“... the early Auden. (He does not, however, give us the earliest text of ‘Spain’, defended by E.P. Thompson in ‘Outside the Whale’.) Some critics would see Tony Harrison as a leading continuer of the radical tradition. Where Hill eschews the prosaic, Harrison courts it, pushing poetry to the brink of banality in the manner of the Lyrical Ballads, trying ...”

“... Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also ...”

“... He was referring to the ‘Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism’ launched by E.P. Thompson and John Saville in 1957 as a forum for what they called ‘Britain’s largest unorganised party – the ex-communist party’. The New Reasoner ran to ten issues before being absorbed into the fledgling New Left Review, and it included a memorable ...”

“... for what is inadequately called ‘labour history’: in the hands of Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson et al it is more the biography of a class than a narrative or analysis of politics. A similar spirit has animated the study of the intellectual underworld, and the interrelationship of magic, religion and science. Women’s history – in Britain, mostly ...”

“... scholars who have supposedly tried to disguise or minimise this fact, first and foremost E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. (He takes special delight in exposing Thompsonian heroes such as William Cobbett and William Blake as racists and misogynists, less convincingly in the second case.) How can contempt be overcome? How can low and abused subjects ...”

“... conflict with the Soviet Union, the theatre in which we feared the war would erupt. As E.P. Thompson wrote, ‘it has never been true that nuclear war is “unthinkable”. It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.’ The Western model of capitalism may have won – or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb ...”

“... editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies against ...”