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“... For the past thirty years Gertrude Himmelfarb has sounded a discordant and unusual note among writers on Victorian England. She defended a (small c) ‘conservative’ perspective long before conservatism became intellectually fashionable. She was deciphering ‘ideas in context’ more than a decade before such an approach became the new orthodoxy of academic journals: indeed, her stock-in-trade has been to show that the great minds of the past look quite different if viewed from their own setting rather than from the time-capsule of highbrow reputation ...”

“... who tried to do something about it? It is to the answering of these fundamental questions that Gertrude Himmelfarb has devoted her most ambitious book. In terms of its subject and its approach, this is a quintessentially Himmelfarbian performance. In this book, as in her others, she is primarily concerned with the study of minds – a key word in her ...”

“... and by those who are neither. This, in essence, is the position which the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb adopts in Victorian Values, an address delivered last year to the Centre for Policy Studies. Like all of her work, it is shrewd and well-written. Historians, she argues, are being condescending when they dismiss ...”

“... has come full circle. Young aimed his shot specifically at Bloomsbury. More recently, Gertrude Himmelfarb, in an essay entitled A Genealogy of Morals: From Clapham to Bloomsbury, has ostensibly aimed at the same target, but indirectly, and from a position of American neo-conservatism: she indicts by implication the libertarian excesses of ...”

“... monastic by contrast to the friends whose hands they held at moments of crisis. Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb are Philemon and Baucis, not Abelard and Héloïse and never mind Dorothea and Casaubon. No breath of scandal attaches to Susan Sontag, much admired and desired as she was and is. My old comrade Norman Birnbaum was once married to Edith ...”

“... almost unbelievable crudity, ‘Sapper’ and Dornford Yates. Despite defences of John Buchan by Gertrude Himmelfarb in an essay in Encounter in 1960, and Janet Adam Smith in her biography of 1965, the mud stuck. By the end of the Sixties in England, John Buchan was sinking towards oblivion, the sort of forgotten bestseller (like Phillips Oppenheim) you ...”

“... of a world government? And does it not deny identity as something inherited rather than chosen? Gertrude Himmelfarb cites ‘the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community – and nationality’. Similarly, Charles Taylor reminds Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national ...”

“... and to that end he also devotes space to such non-liberal figures as the Cold War conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb, who serves to emphasise ‘the elective affinities and occasional alliances between Cold War liberalism and its sequels of neoconservatism and neoliberalism’. His reasons for including Hannah Arendt are more obscure, but seem related ...”