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“... of poets – she and her husband, Wilfred Meynell, also nurtured the talent of the wayward Francis Thompson. Meynell found the meanings ‘crowded’ in Williams’s early poems; it’s a relief she was spared the later ones. With his taste for ritual and belonging, it’s something of a surprise that Williams didn’t join Meynell in the Catholic ...”

“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was ...”

“... histories much more sceptical and critical than the first. Writers such as Douglas Hay, E.P. Thompson, Michael Ignatieff, and especially Michel Foucault, retold the story in a much more analytical and sophisticated way, showing how criminal justice developments were tied into wider social movements such as the rise of capitalism, the expansion of the ...”

“... Daily Express would be a Labour newspaper. I expected all the formidable skills of George Malcolm Thompson – or old Greenwich Mean Time, as we used to call the chief leader-writer – to be directed first to securing the leadership of the Labour Party for my hero, Aneurin Bevan. Thereafter, no effort was to be spared in achieving the election of a Labour ...”

“... work from which McKenna quotes with a certain relish. The arrest was a worrying moment for John Fiske, the American consul in Edinburgh, whose love letters to Boulton were already in the hands of the police and who was no doubt looking into diplomatic immunity. It was also a troubling time for Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, son of the Duke of ...”

“... cynicism and credulity. There are thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson who can be too positive about ordinary human capabilities, and others like Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and the later Frankfurt School who are a good deal too sceptical of them. This is​ a bold book, not least because Felski must know that it risks ...”

“... Wat Tyler (by Ros Faith), observations on George V’s Silver Jubilee as celebrated in Kenya (by John Lonsdale), a powerful dissection of the problems of writing the history of the Communist Parties (by Perry Anderson), and reference to an Italian cowherd who constructed his own version of the Odyssey because he found the original too long to memorise. There ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... He was often compared with other practitioners of ‘history from below’, such as Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé, even though their Marxism was anathema to him. His magnum opus, on the armées révolutionnaires, the semi-vigilante armed bands who enforced the Terror in the provinces in 1793-4, might, in theory, have ...”

“... transformation in this subject in the two decades after 1965. Inspired by the work of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, American scholars redefined a field which had been almost exclusively taken up with the history of trades union to encompass working-class life and culture outside the workplace as well as within it. Practised primarily by historians ...”

“... distinction of that earlier generation of fellows: not just AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... monarchism is in tension with some proto-republican elements. Paulin’s next major monarchist, John Dryden, seems a less ambiguous figure: ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, which Paulin much admires and prints in full, presents the political debate stirred up by the Whigs as a feverish disease of which the body politic needs to be cured. This nostalgia for an ...”