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“... This is the second collection of essays by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to appear in English. The first was called The Territory of the Historian and up to a point justified its title by describing a landscape of historical investigation – rural France peopled by a peasantry engaged in earning a living and undergoing birth, disease and death, the whole benignly directed by techniques of quantification ...”

“... Has there ever been a theme as much studied by English historians as the history of Parliament? At one time, indeed, it seemed almost to stand in for the history of the country itself: history equalled politics, and politics equalled Parliament. Stubbs structured the 14th and 15th centuries around what were, after all, intermittent and occasional meetings of this supposedly representative body; the Tudor century received blame for not having a true parliament, one worthy of the name, since the monarchs were supposedly allowed to do as they pleased with it; the origins, history and consequences of the Great Rebellion were seen to revolve around Parliament; and after 1660 everything became Parliament and parties, leading on to the zenith of their history in the 19th century ...”

“... In the reign of Henry VIII, when a man was arrested for treason (an arrest which, among the eminent, tended to be equal to a conviction, with the usual consequences), his papers were confiscated and disappeared into the royal archives in the Tower. Considering the number of people who suffered this fate, the amount of surviving material is distressingly small ...”

“... This could be called a review of the three Regiuses. G.R. Elton is at present Regius Professor at Cambridge. Owen Chadwick, to whom tribute is paid in a festschrift, is his predecessor in the same chair, while Lord Dacre of Glanton, more commonly known as Professor Trevor-Roper, is the recently retired Regius Professor at Oxford ...”

“... 1983 was Professor Elton’s ‘grand climacteric’. For though the crucial age in astrology is 63 and he is only 61, there can be no doubt when a few short months saw the publication of a ‘birthday book’ by his American friends, his appointment to the Regius Chair of History at Cambridge, the appearance of the third volume of his own collected essays, and a short book in which Elton and Robert Fogel, doyen of American quantitative historians, debate ‘which road to the past?’ In these circumstances to go beyond a mere review to ask ‘whither Elton’ is a duty – and for some reviewers a pleasure ...”

“... Sir Geoffrey Elton’s latest reflections on the state and status of his subject illustrate the Coleridgean maxim that a man is more likely to be right in what he affirms than in what he denies. Arising from lectures delivered, one imagines, off the cuff to an audience at the University of Michigan, they consist for the most part of soundings-off against a rogues’ gallery of ideological and academical types and tendencies which he believes constitute a threat to the proper study and use of the past ...”

“... historians who over the last thirty years have dominated Tudor scholarship, A.G. Dickens and G.R. Elton. I remember very well my excitement on first reading in 1964, the year of its publication, Professor Dickens’s The English Reformation. His thesis was almost precisely the opposite of Scarisbrick’s. What he portrayed was a late Medieval Church ...”

“... tell their own story: Tudor England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is ...”

“... power. Hence monarchy’s enduring popularity. In his quirky late essay The English (1992), G.R. Elton asserted that England’s remarkable independence ‘sprang surprisingly enough from the strength and weight of the monarchy. Kings of England commanded a range of power and control over all subjects which outdistanced supposedly greater monarchs on the ...”

“... So it was with some sense of shock that I read David Cressy’s claim that ‘the great G.R. Elton . . . pioneered the practice of microhistory’ in his Star Chamber Stories (1958). Elton may have been a great historian; he certainly dominated the study of Tudor history through the 1960s and 1970s. But it would have ...”

“... pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan belatedly finding much to approve in G.R. Elton on Thomas Cromwell, or J.H. Plumb on Walpole. Whether Elton or Plumb would be pleased about the use he makes of them is another matter: Anderson, by the way, has a highly penetrating assessment of Walpole as Thompson’s ...”

“... acknowledged or derided as the founder of the modern centralised English state – although G.R. Elton traced that centralisation back a good deal further. It is piquant that Bluff King Hal’s name still crops up today in the shape of the ‘Henry VIII clause’, the nickname for a device which gives a minister carte blanche when introducing a new law. The ...”

“... with his immediate contemporaries, Briggs’s writing lacks the combative forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the olympian grandeur of Owen Chadwick, the stylish verve of J.H. Plumb, the cosmopolitan allusiveness of E.J. Hobsbawm, and the impassioned radicalism of Christopher Hill. Some have criticised his work for being too bland, for lacking analytical bite, for ...”

“... historians of the subject; in the Dodds’ own perception, ‘scientific history’; in G.R. Elton’s judgment, ‘beyond challenge’. But Hoyle puts his finger on the Dodds’ predicament. As liberal, Whiggish historians (which goes for Gardiner, too), they wanted to celebrate the Pilgrimage as a noble episode in the struggle between liberty and ...”

“... the TLS of 4 March 1977 and cringing at the discovery that my doctoral supervisor, Geoffrey Elton, had indulged in a penchant for verse, prefacing his review of G.R. Potter’s Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one ...”