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“... Why should embroidery exist? Its aim is the enhancement of fabrics, and so it might be expected to flourish only when the manufacture of such fabrics is confined to plain products. Would there need to be embroidery on the best fabrics of the Persian world, or on the wonderful silks displayed in the Japanese exhibition of a few years back? Perhaps there would: personal or religious symbols might be demanded by persons of special status, and anyone likely to be able to afford the basic fabric would probably consider themselves special ...”

“... These well-worn lines of Kipling’s encapsulate an enduring feature of the popular English concept of national history – its cosiness. Because of the remarkable quantity and quality of local documentary sources covering more than nine centuries, the historian of England is able to identify with them, and to throw the mantle of Victorian law-abiding domesticity over the past ...”

“... The Kelsalls and Davidoff and Hall are worker pairs who have been looking into the family life of a restricted group over a halfcentury or so, using a wide range of the documentation generated by their subjects. Both groups studied were experiencing insecurity. The Scottish families were of landed class, made insecure by sudden changes in politics and in the control and policy of the Church; the English families a century later were of the emerging middle class, busy creating niches in the professions and in the world of manufacturing business ...”

“... The first three of these books combine to remind us of the role of economic development in our history, and force home the fact that there can be no true separation of economic history from other histories. The dates bounding the Checklands’ volume in the New History of Scotland might seem to be ones of political significance primarily, but 1832 and 1914 mark very nearly the span of the domination of heavy industry in Scotland, the special concentration of population and skill on the Clyde, and the social developments that came from the labour requirements of coal, iron and, eventually, shipbuilding ...”

“... The leading figures in all these books are well-known, and are located in a period of conspicuous intellectual activity in the Scotland of the mid and late 18th century. This was the time when the modern social sciences were created as areas of legitimate study, much of their content for the use of teenage university students. There was also a modest literary revival ...”

“... These books all set out to tell us about ourselves, and to do it by quantification. Their statements are based on economic statistics, demography, official and unofficial measurements, including the measurement of opinion. Some of their conclusions will surprise, for no one reader can expect to have covered the full range of social activity. Their quality must depend on the quality of the ‘facts’ they elicit ...”

“... Marriage is still, despite evasive strategies by some of the young, the central decision of most people’s lives, and of the three events which structure population, the only one completely under human control. The control is not exclusively that of the leading participants: who is free to marry whom, for example, is defined by law. But for the most part the Western European marriage has been the result of a deliberate choice by two people ...”

“... Historians of any society have to learn to be wary of the accepted myths of their subject. Sometimes these bogus visions of the past are deliberately created or fostered by the governing group. Sometimes they come from an educated but perhaps unsophisticated middle class, anxious to gain historical sanction for its security and power. Sometimes these beliefs are the possession and creation of the working class ...”

“... The title of this book means what it says: it is about England, not England and Wales. The exclusion of the Celtic fringe can be explained by the very real difficulties which arise for some forms of historical reconstruction from the narrow range of Welsh surnames and the weakness of the Established Church in Wales. The work is based on the extraction of figures from parish registers, the Census, once it was established, ‘family reconstitution’ carried out for a dozen parishes, a central group of experts using sophisticated numerical methods in Cambridge and the strengths of computerisation ...”

“... Family Forms in Historic Europe is a collection of local studies from different parts of Europe, mostly based on ‘listings’: that is, on descriptions of the occupants of a local unit on a specific date, usually by household. Who is resident at any moment in a household depends on traditions of family structure, on birth, marriage and death rates, on the employment prospects of the inmates, or the needs of the family occupation, and sometimes on the active pressure of governing bodies, the landowner or the state ...”

“... for political devolution – seemed to exhibit all the ‘protean strength’ which has fascinated Rosalind Mitchison in the collection she has edited of essays on Northern European nationalism.* Here was a community, as she points out, confirmed in its feeling of separateness and cultural integrity by institutions new and old – the modern machinery of ...”

“... show that she was attempting a genuinely comparative study of witchcraft in Europe. Like Professor Mitchison, Dr Larner saw Scotland in 1600 as having more in common with the continent of Europe than it did with its big southern neighbour, and she suggested that Scottish witchcraft cases had more in common with Continental than with English cases. This is true ...”

“... into the tradition of individualism, which in Sam tips so effortlessly into fascism, and which, as Rosalind Mitchison once put it, could mean permissiveness, but ‘could also mean the expression of the personality of the father at the expense of everyone else’. Too easy, because, as Christina Stead shows in this novel, there are other ...”

“... with ‘care and detachment’ – unlike, apparently, the many other items in the bibliography of Rosalind Mitchison’s History of Scotland (1970, 1982) which are by civil servants and experts and therefore incapable of bias. Of course we must be alert and swallow nothing without due care. But when the scholars do manage to verify the eye-witness ...”

“... thing. Scotland and Wales are built into the brickwork in Volume One. ‘The haggis,’ writes Rosalind Mitchison, is ‘unmistakably the food of a poor nation’. In the same brisk tone she traces the distinctive features of the economic, political and religious history of Scotland up to 1850. For Christopher Smout the subsequent history of Scotland ...”