William Lamont

Reading Patrick Collinson’s informative essay in the last issue (LRB, 22 February), I wondered if he remembered a Past and Present conference on popular religion we both attended in 1966. From the floor at one session, Lawrence Stone, in a high state of excitement, asked if England ever had a university don creating a popular religion. A voice at the back shouted out: ‘Wyclif.’ Stone looked stricken,...

Lytton Strachey wrote a brilliant, error-laden essay on the Muggletonians in 1924. He wondered if any were still alive. If they were, he said, it was because in England heretics were tortured ‘not to death, oh no! – but to some extent’. J.L. Nelson (LRB, 7 June) argues that, ‘without systematic persecution’, the Cathars too might have ‘survived in a twilight zone and faded away unnoticed,...

Readers who enjoyed Peter Ghosh’s elegant dismantling of Richard Evans’s case for Rankean empiricism (LRB, 15 October) may wish to go on to read Quentin Skinner’s essay on Geoffrey Elton’s defence of history (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Volume VII, 1997), which it complements admirably.

Perry Anderson’s Diary (LRB, 21 October) was moving and perceptive on E.P. Thompson. On one small point of difference with Thompson, he seems to me to be half-right. He suggests a Blake/Muggletonian connection, less in ‘New Jerusalem’ common aspirations, than in a provident keep-your-head-below-the-parapet stance in the age of Jacobinism. This is a good corrective to over-romanticising Blake...

‘The impeccably liberal Ernest Barker’ (Perry Anderson: LRB, 24 September)? Would ‘peccably’ be better? In 1937 he made a favourable comparison between Hitler and Cromwell in a swastika-draped hall in Hamburg: see his Oliver Cromwell and the English People (Cambridge, 1937).