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“... society with a renewed faith in its capacity for progress. At the opposite pole of politics, Maurice Cowling abhors the secular modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal ...”

“... been potent enough to persuade Simon Heffer to follow in the footsteps of his Peter-house mentor, Maurice Cowling, and see whether Carlyle can be given the final accolade. It seems a pretty tall order, even though, as every schoolchild knows (as Macaulay used to say), Carlyle became in old age a frantic exponent of racism and other comparable ...”

“... a violent dislike of Lord Snow. Oddly, since Leavis’s intense moralism is the sort of thing that Cowling most detests: but that only makes it clearer how some spirit of the place managed to affect them both. Leavis is not mentioned in these pages, but many Cambridge figures, past and present, are. The author relishes the utter inconspicuousness of some of ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... what a magnificent tribute that would constitute to his prescience in statecraft! Alas, Mr Maurice Cowling, than whom no Tory historian is higher or drier, emerged from the murky recesses of Peterhouse with a vast manuscript, securely girdled with impeccable scholarship and a black bow-tie. It demonstrated that the Second Reform Act, though passed ...”

“... is the third historian to write about the appeasement crisis explicitly in this vein, following Maurice Cowling (The Impact of Hitler, 1975) and John Charmley (Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, 1989). Crowcroft presents himself as a disciple of Cowling and The End Is Nigh is a racier, more simplistic and more emotive ...”

“... history. The superficial facts of parliamentary reform and democratisation notwithstanding, Maurice Cowling and his acolytes cynically laid bare the regime of ‘high politics’ that continued to operate within a narrow governing elite. Was constitutional history a highbrow Mother Goose, its reassuring tales conspicuously failing to explain how ...”

“... he tried to bring the middle-class woman in. There is also the paradox tentatively suggested by Maurice Cowling, who has hinted that Mill was an authoritarian Liberal for whom liberty was code for a species of refined coercion. There may be something in this. If it is asked whether Mill wanted to turn an England of parish churches, Sunday Schools and ...”

“... is not as novel as some of its recent practitioners like to think (he mentions as precursors Maurice Cowling and Michael Bentley), but he gives one of the most impressive proofs to date of its potential to open up understanding of ideological messaging, the importance of which in British politics has seldom been adequately recognised, and has ...”

“... even notice – this. The volumes of essays published in 1993 and 2002 to honour the work of Maurice Cowling, after all, contain not a single piece by a woman. But scholars who learned as students to recognise gender as a key locus of power and to chide each other for being insufficiently attuned to its workings (James Vernon in 1994 discerned ...”

“... powers of the state have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such ...”

“... he found that he was resented by some older dons. The bitchiest of all the sniping came from Maurice Bowra, who wrote to Waugh that ‘Trevor-Roper is a fearful man, short-sighted, with dripping eyes, shows off all the time, sucks up to me, boasts, is far from poor owing to his awful book, on every page of which there is a ...”

“... the ‘intellectual attitude’ of Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and the like ‘was closer to that of Maurice Cowling than to Nikolaus Pevsner’. It’s as if a boy had supposed that, because one of his schoolmasters won a medal in the war, he must have been a hero whose exploits were familiar to all adults. Peter Fuller was an undergraduate at Peterhouse ...”

“... and public health, to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster ...”

“... and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some ...”