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“... conspired to ignore that progress or been duped into denying it. Wootton’s target of choice is Roy Porter, who wrote that ‘only the most dyed-in-the-wool Whig history still polarises the past in terms of confrontations between saints and sinners, heroes and villains.’ Wootton is happy to acknowledge that his book ‘is written against the grain of ...”

“... in January’s Cosmopolitan) suggest that maybe there is nothing to tell, only telling itself. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall say they agree with Michel Foucault that ‘sex must be understood as discursively produced.’ (Actually, I don’t think they do agree, but more about that later.) If we take the point, then the history of sexual knowledge ...”

“... furiously. These books demonstrate once again that omniverous reading, massive industry, and what Roy Porter aptly calls a lethal power of concentration, are the cardinal virtues of the historian. Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire swelled to six volumes, a million and a half words, and eight thousand footnotes; his testicle ...”

“... with English linguistic history. For example, the collection of papers edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Language, Self and Society. This, you’d think (I thought), is just what is needed to excite a fresh interest in the history of English. Well, I thought wrong. The volume is too miscellaneous in topic and treatment to fulfil the claims of its ...”

“... books on British social history is nearly always greater than their whole. To say this of Roy Porter’s Pelican social history of 18th-century England is not to denigrate his remarkable achievement. This is a brilliant work of synthesis. Almost every recent monograph and essay is skilfully woven into ...”

“... It continues a series which started with Enlightenment in National Context (1981), also edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich. The idea for this series seems a very good one; the books are of interest both to the specialist (since nobody could be a specialist on all these countries) and to the general reader. This volume gives a vivid picture of the ...”

“... and imaginations of Britons at home. Neither Stephen Daniels’s collection of essays nor those in Roy Porter’s Myths of the English explore the imperial-domestic connection directly. Yet both books illuminate its importance.To begin with, and as several of Daniels’s fine, perceptive essays suggest, knowing that they were an imperial people made ...”

“... personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph Houlbrooke: Roy Porter, the historian of medicine. Both in his recorded conversation with Dinnage, who is a research psychologist by discipline, and in his academic essay, ‘Death and the Doctors in Georgian England’, ...”

“... long-standing consensus of reformers and Whigs, Foucauldians and Anglo-Saxon revisionists, which Roy Porter’s dazzlingly written Mind Forg’d Manacles aims to upset. Examining the ‘long 18th century’ from the Restoration to the Regency, he attempts to provide the first systematic account of the evolution of attitudes to-wards insanity; of the ...”

“... from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of universal libertinism in the 18th century, much of it ‘under the aegis of a benevolent Nature’, which raises as many questions as it makes statements. Some of the claims for unfettered fornication – a Scottish minister ...”

“... Witchcraft can be seen as an area of criminal law, a manifestation of religious belief or secular power, a sign of social stress, a display of sexual prejudice and fear, a temporary and inexplicable mania, or a nasty and squalid manifestation of cruelty. Some of these approaches are unrewarding because they deflect the critical intellect; some can lead to historical understanding ...”

“... monograph on the history of the York Retreat, and the two volumes of essays edited by Bynum, Porter and Shepherd, pay eloquent testimony to the transformation effected in the history of psychiatry over the last twenty or thirty years. The works of Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, and more recently the contributions of Andrew Scull ...”

“... In Europe the health-seeker may still go barefoot in dew-treading meadows, as enjoined by Father Kneipp, or sniff the gentle mist from rows of brine-soaked hedges, as at Bad Kreuznach, or wallow in the black mud laid on at almost any decent spa. What the British call sea-bathing is available as thalassotherapy, or, with added sand, as thalassopsammotherapy ...”

“... No one should take comfort from the title of Roy Porter’s shaggy masterpiece of a history of medicine. ‘The Greatest Benefit to Mankind’ – the phrase is Dr Johnson’s – begs for a question-mark, a rising inflection of incredulity, if not outright disbelief. Porter is too ebullient, too much of an optimist, too little of a polemicist to supply the Rousseauian rejoinder: ‘An art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure ...”

“... passages from Rasselas as accurate, even ‘beautiful’ (John Haslam, 1808) and ‘poignant’ (Roy Porter, 1987) illustrations of the workings of madness. The old astronomer has come to believe that, far from merely observing the weather, he is regulating it: a reason for deep anxiety since his responsibility is greater than that of any monarch, and ...”