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“... mansion, where Washington and his wife lived, attended by slaves dressed in red and white livery. Mary Thompson’s book is the most detailed examination yet published of slavery at Mount Vernon. Thompson has worked for many years as a research historian at the estate and has a perhaps excessive admiration for ...”

“... his own political views. More significant to Edwards’s politics was his marriage by 1694 to Mary Thompson, stepdaughter and heir of the Catholic printer Nathaniel Thompson, at a time when a crackdown on Jacobite printing was devastating the underground press. There was now a gap in the market and Edwards had his ...”

“... to argue how far these ‘translations’ established his reputation or led to misrecognitions. Mary Lago’s Imperfect Encounter (1972) is one gate-of-entry into these problems of mismatch between the expectations of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John ...”

“... And I still loathe my wicked stepmother. This last is what needs acknowledging, because as I read Mary Whitehouse’s letters, everything about her, except the trim tailoring, reminded me of my wicked stepmother.* There was the same quivering, tight-lipped prissiness, the untroubled moral righteousness, a desire for the respectable and normal so powerful ...”

“... they have picked them up from the newspapers, or from each other. And the small defendants, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, seem to belong in some other reality. Again, the book’s cadences and concerns go to work, drawing out a reinforcing memory. Our legal system can seem divorced from reality, estranging; the people in a courtroom can seem to live in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... woman served three weeks for begging, another one week for drunkenly disrupting a church service. Mary Spillane was sentenced to death after her baby was found dead in a dust heap, before being reprieved on account of her gender. (The baby’s father was charged but never stood trial.) Prison visits by upper-middle-class lady well-wishers, following Elizabeth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Edward Thompson’s Customs in Common is described as a ‘companion volume’ to his The Making of the English Working Class, and rises to the occasion. It has the wide range of reference, the densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the Prado is one of many illustrations of the popular legend about a statue of the Virgin Mary coming to life. Like a bartender doing a trick pour, she squirts a jet of breast milk into the praying saint’s mouth to reward him for his devotion. The story, Freedberg explains, is a miraculous amplification of the way images are used in many ...”

“... I am got somewhat rational now, & don’t bite any one.’ Four months later, his older sister, Mary, murdered their mother in a moment of insanity, and might have murdered their demented father had Lamb not arrived home and snatched away the knife. He arranged to have Mary taken to a private asylum (being judged not of ...”

“... last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was working ...”

“... or endemically of the Left; it has often been loyalist and royalist, and the take-over by E. P. Thompson is exposed as the irreligious left-winger’s imperialism. Davie is not only stringent, he is cogent – as only an extended instance of his interrogation can show: Kolakowski, declaring himself Encounter an ‘inconsistent atheist’, had decided that ...”

“... humiliated state of mind of its tenant.’ Steedman notes that he was then about to set up with Mary Wollstonecraft in neighbouring houses, and had reasons of his own to ponder the effect that servants – perhaps abject and depressed – might have on a household’s children. Another device Steedman uses to keep the practical, experiential context in the ...”