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“... but, on the other, could, if the government of the day was sufficiently determined, stand up to wage demands which other employers might be forced to concede because they could not afford the costs of a protracted strike in the way that a nationalised industry could. In practice, the nationalised industries were run in much the same way by much the same ...”

“... When, in 1991, I was asked to chair the Royal Commission established in the immediate aftermath of the quashing of the convictions of the Birmingham Six, I was just as surprised as were the media, who on the day it was announced were reduced to projecting my passport photograph on the TV screen for the news programme which, as it happened, I watched in my room in a lodging house in Belfast, where I had just given a long-arranged lecture at the Queen’s University on a totally different sociological topic ...”

“... These seminars are always invigorating, and never more so than one evening this February when W.G. Runciman urged the necessity of refounding sociology along Darwinian lines. Weary of such pronouncements though they might be, even the most sceptical sociologists could not have failed to realise that here was a serious challenge to theoretical orthodoxy. For ...”

“... advances that would influence the course of social science around the world. In this milieu, W. G. Runciman was a seminal figure, who appeared as puzzling to the uninitiated as the discipline he studied. He was an internationally-known sociologist at a university that apparently had no department of sociology. It was rumoured that ...”

“... which has made them so, stops men moving, as Macaulay was to continue to do, between worlds. W.G. Runciman is an exception. By the time he himself was 34, he too had had a fellowship at Trinity, where he holds one now, had read very widely and written three books, joined the family business, which he now runs, and despite being thus tethered to within a mile ...”

“... most direct engagement with his fear of dying can be found in a letter he wrote to my father, W.G. Runciman, in November 1978, following the publication of his poem ‘Aubade’, which begins:I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.In time the curtain-edges will grow light.Till then I see what’s really always ...”

“... was presently to agree with the wily Hitchens about the sincerity of Margaret Thatcher. W.G. Runciman had written, in 1981, that he foresaw the emergence, ‘for the first time in British political history’, of ‘a new left which is to the right of the old’. One reason for Thatcher’s eluding wasmification is that the Labour ministers who ...”

“... that the world as described by the Daily Mail is the real world. In the LRB of 22 June, W.G. Runciman suggested that the present government has emerged fairly naturally from changes in the British electorate, especially in ‘attitudes to affluence’ and equality. Indeed, he argues that a perfectly ruthless and opportunist politician (he does not think ...”

“... a bit déclassé, or indeed jamais classé. And our form guide is Walter Garrison, 3rd Viscount Runciman, the former president of the British Academy, whose jacket photo shows him sitting, presumably in his study in Cambridge, fingers interlaced, gazing evenly at the reader. It’s fitting, then, that the three greats are dispatched with superb ...”

“... was not the question of who owned what or controlled it, but a roller-coaster of irresponsible wage demands, demands which, after 1974, were pressed most remorselessly against an employing Labour state itself. And in 1977, Fred Hirsch, a professor at Warwick, came up with what appeared to be an explanation of how this had come about. Commentators seized ...”

“... intellectual projects of recent years is coming to fruition. The first volume of W.G. Runciman’s Treatise on Social Theory, devoted to the dry topic of methodology, set out in reasonable and moderate tones an agenda for social understanding combining – in so many words – ambitions of a Ranke, a Comte, a Proust and a Hart: to report ...”

“... paper, and are now reprinted in Engagement, on Michael Mann, Norberto Bobbio, Roberto Unger, W.G. Runciman. Andreas Hillgruber, Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, Carlo Ginzburg, Isaiah Berlin, Fernand Braudel and Francis Fukuyama. More recently (LRB, 24 September and 22 October), he has extended himself to Michael Oakeshott and others of Oakeshott’s generation on ...”

“... took its time before climbing on the sociology bandwagon (no reference to the work of W.G. Runciman). Odd, too, that Appleton and Aston are missing from the roll-call of the Cavendish. Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel ...”

“... His peers were figures such as, say, the anthropologist Jack Goody or the social theorist W.G. Runciman – theorists of great conceptual and empirical range, but not primarily contemporary political and cultural commentators – rather than media-friendly academics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper or A.J. Ayer. The very enterprise of comparative historical ...”