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“... Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in the hamlet of Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a nursemaid and a stonemason. At the village school she was good at skipping and scripture. She was expected to go into service like most of her schoolfriends, but she was bad at sewing and ineffective with babies; when she was 14 she became a post-office clerk in a nearby village ...”

“... architecture that calls as strongly as does sex? Meanwhile, in Grayshott Post Office, sat Flora Thompson – with enough literature to win New Statesman comps ...”

“... An outsider​ by birth as well as by disposition, Flora Thompson took solitary pleasure in observing her fellow villagers. She stored away characters and scenes from an early age – the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest – but published nothing until she was in her thirties, and nothing on her childhood until her early sixties ...”

“... forgetting 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 ...”

“... may be dismissed in Chapter Four too summarily. Old-age pensions transformed life for the old, Flora Thompson remembered in Lark Rise; and they must have been a blessing also to a great many younger families with old folk to support. But what matters is that Europe’s ruling classes – like all outdated social groups, far removed from ordinary life ...”

“... monarchy comparable in scholarly stature to Denis Mack Smith on the Kings of Italy. Dorothy Thompson’s study of Queen Victoria is thus the more to be welcomed, for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at ...”

“... which many political persuasions – from Clarendon, Hume and Macaulay to A.J.P. Taylor and E. P. Thompson – have helped an emerging nation make sense of itself. There are now good reasons, as Linda Colley and Chris Bayly have suggested, to bring the Empire to the centre of domestic history and to show how a wider world changed our experience of ...”

“... explained by changing economic circumstances that eroded relations between the classes. E.P. Thompson saw them as ‘a characteristic form of social protest’, their anonymity serving as a measure of protection. Many threatened murder, or arson. Cockayne resists Thompson’s analysis, urging the need for a more ...”

“... very well the significance of the Indian mythology of sex: potent long ago in the novels of Flora Annie Steel, with their wicked Indian cult leaders demanding blood sacrifices of young white women; later refined in the central image of A Passage to India, which has fascinated so many readers and novelists alike. (Forster’s variation is to fall in love ...”

“... is impossible to believe that to make it visible again would have any very adverse effect on the flora of the glen. To open a narrow passage from the refuge, across the plunge-pool to the waterfall and bridge, would require nothing more than lopping a few branches, felling a handful of scrawny trees and ensuring, year by year, that new branches and saplings ...”

“... were in, was supposed to follow his family down the stairs. The minicab driver’s disabled wife, Flora, was carried down the entire 23 flights on the back of her son, Farhad, a recent graduate in mechanical engineering who had martial arts training. Both he and his mother survived. Sepideh and her son, Karen Aboud and her sons, Hamid the fish-seller, Mr ...”