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“... and that ‘the crazed parataxis still flashes the voltage of the street.’ We are told that Robert Southey’s ‘over-long nose’ gave his face a ‘workmanlike quality, and his work ethic is what he is largely remembered for’. And this, of a representation of melancholy: ‘He wears only linens over his loins. If they are soiled, we don’t ...”

“... It’s the thing you do that makes you good,’ Gladwell observes. Or as my old piano teacher Mrs Thompson used to say, ‘Practice makes perfect.’ The amount of practice is apparently quantifiable. On Mrs Thompson’s unscientific estimate (though let’s not forget the argument of Blink), half an hour a day was more ...”

“... disarray of entities, interests and occasions’. Some of these mechanisms no longer applied, and Robert Harley, the brilliant minister who investigated the Memorial, may have been bluffing when he wrote in 1702 that there remained ‘sufficient authoritys given by the Laws in being for suppressing’ seditious print. But new patches were being stitched onto ...”

“... E.P. Thompson called it the ‘Natopolitan’ world: that is, not just Nato plus all the Cold War military and political institutions that were integral to it, but also a mentality whose web extended over a lot more activity and thought, even in the minds of individuals, than anyone at the time had suspected. Of course there were the revelations in the mid-Sixties about Encounter and the CIA, and later in the US and Britain a stream of disclosures about covert counter-insurgency in every form, from secretly underwritten academic research to assassinations and mass killings ...”

“... patronage. The jury which acquitted of treason one of the London Corresponding Society leaders, Dr Robert Crossfield, in 1796 was made up of two merchants, two masons, a corn factor, sugar baker, wine merchant, coachmaker, carpenter, bookseller, distiller and tailor. While the members of working trades represented on such panels were not journeymen or ...”

“... political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal. From the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to Waterloo in 1815, Britain faced a ...”

“... exactly what we see here as we follow the signatures of Daniel Stanger, Edward Stanger, Jannet Thompson et al. On a blank page a note records that the book was given to James Stanger by Robert Fisher in 1662, ‘in steade of one that he had of mine when he went away from Thorntwhait’. Typically, it seems that The ...”

“... In 1941 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson published an essay called ‘Who Goes Nazi?’ She proposed ‘an interesting and somewhat macabre parlour game’ to be played at dinner parties. The concept is in the name: look around the room and everybody swings one way or the other. She runs through various guests: the sportsman bank vice-president (Nazi); the threadbare editor (not a Nazi); the scientist’s masochist wife (Nazi); the chauffeur’s grandson serving drinks (not a Nazi); the Jewish speculator who doesn’t like Jews (Nazi); the quiet Jewish man from the South (not a Nazi ...”

“... a German-controlled Europe made such detachment harder to sustain. As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly ...”

“... and untrustworthy, selfish and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take ...”

“... you do now notice in the mainstream media. One example occurred on the death of Hunter S. Thompson. When he died, several newspapers shared with us, often in the opening sentence, President Nixon’s opinion that ‘Hunter S. Thompson represented the dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big ...”

“... one nagging uncertainty. Hoggart and Williams are a natural comparison, though Williams and E.P. Thompson, the third side of the familiar triangle, are the more discussed, partly because of their greater prominence as left intellectuals. Since Williams’s death in 1988 there has been a small industry of writing about him, both in Britain and ...”

“... Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having already produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, ...”

“... pale mother nourishes her child to the deadly slaughter.’ So oppressive were the rich and great, Robert Crowley declared in 1550, that ‘we must needs fight it out, or else be brought to the like slavery that the Frenchmen are in!’ ‘European slavery is indeed a state of liberty, if compared with that which prevails in the other three divisions of the ...”