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“... do better to go directly to the scholars whose work he has borrowed from – Cockburn, Langbein, Douglas Hay, and especially J.M. Beattie’s Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800. Never mind. Verdict according to Conscience gathers a great deal together in one place, has many shrewd pages and much patient exposition. It will be a resource for many ...”

“... the working-class outskirts of English culture to its middle and upper-class core, from outlandish Douglas, Pandy and Salford to chairs at London, Cambridge and Oxford, takes on something of an epic air, almost at one with the path from Caliban’s cave to Prospero’s study. One advantage of being on the periphery is that you know where the centre is. ‘I ...”

“... a model. Bill Connor, who would become the columnist ‘Cassandra’, was recruited from J. Walter Thompson, where he had been a copywriter. Cudlipp, who was now in London with Kemsley’s Sunday Chronicle, joined as assistant features editor. His brother Percy was by this time editor of the Evening Standard, but he seems never to have thought about giving his ...”

“... a Test fast bowler. On the basis of this barmy idea the England football manager should bear Daley Thompson in mind for the next World Cup. His speed on the ground and power in the air could be devastating. Quite when the modern lapse into thuggery occurred is difficult to pinpoint. Was it the West Indians, Hall and Griffiths, or our own John Snow? More ...”

“... attempt suicide. The report singles out the recent deaths in custody of two trans women, Vicky Thompson and Joanne Latham, and the case of Tara Hudson, a trans woman who was placed in a men’s prison, as ‘particularly stark illustrations’ (after public pressure, Hudson was moved to a women’s jail). ‘I saw,’ Jacques writes in Trans, ‘that for ...”

“... them. In the Daily Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind him, apparently duetting the Iron Duke’s quip: ‘I don’t know what effect he will have upon the enemy, but, by God, he terrifies me.’ Garland’s cartoon is derivative and poorly executed (it has nothing to ...”

“... so. The concept of sections of society ‘hidden from history’ is a powerful one, deployed by Thompson in his history of the working class, by many feminist historians, by Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in their best-selling works on popular culture in Italy and France, and with less publicity by hosts of local historians. Current interest in ...”

“... Labour Party together. The British left anathematised the EEC as a capitalist club. For E.P. Thompson, it was ‘a group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies’. Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn led a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s ...”

“... an innocent himself. It’s hard to be the tough guy when your hairpiece keeps slipping, so Verita Thompson, a hairdresser and wig-maker, became a trusted presence in his life. Their affair went on for years, and he never had a hair out of place. This isn’t happy reading if you treasure Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, her with an itch above her knee and ...”

“... 4 in 1978: written by a former Doctor Who script editor, it had to be motivated, on some level, by Douglas Adams’s longing to kill his progenitor. After Baker, the Doctor continued through three more incarnations, before its eventual suspension – the BBC never called it a cancellation – in 1989. And there have been many others: the 1960s movies with ...”

“... children; most interestingly where the gate is pushed open by wealthy and powerful people (Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, for instance, suing a magazine for publishing unauthorised photographs of their wedding), and through it in their wake come vulnerable people like Venables and Thompson. I used to argue that ...”

“... John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps that is why ...”

“... Wilson’s delay in devaluing the pound. His sense of social detail is acute, as he reports Alec Douglas-Home’s doomed attempts to be trendy (he announced in a 1964 election speech that his party ‘is delivering the goods and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”