Search Results

“... obscured by a succession of socialist expositors from his Fabian biographer G.D.H. Cole to E.P. Thompson. Believing that Cobbett’s life coincided with the Industrial Revolution’s most violent assault on English labouring conditions (something many economic historians would now dispute), this school of writers interpreted his abiding interest in rural ...”

“... Edward Thompson’s Customs in Common is described as a ‘companion volume’ to his The Making of the English Working Class, and rises to the occasion. It has the wide range of reference, the densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters ...”

“... misleading. In Eighteenth-Century Encounters he reverts to his disagreement with E.P. Thompson about the Berkshire Blacks and the Waltham Black Act of 1723 which made it illegal for anyone to go disguised into woods. The particular issue between Thompson and Rogers is the bearing of the episode upon Pope. ...”

“... editions, the publishing house of the Free French in London, in 1944, Cunard encountered Edward Thompson, to whom she dedicated one of her best poems, ‘Man Ship Tank Gun Plane’. Thompson (father of E.P. Thompson) was a historian and editor of the Augustan Books of Modern Poetry ...”

“... Elmer More whether his God was some kind of Santa Claus. Davie’s eloquent disagreement with E.P. Thompson allows us to see the strength of Davie’s uncompromising position, and also to see what he himself won’t see – or won’t allow himself to say he sees. Davie wishes to divorce Dissent and the Left in Britain, to show that Dissenters in religion ...”

“... term the ‘anti-condescensionists’: that great parade of researchers who, inspired by E.P. Thompson, have set out to rescue not just the poor stockinger or Luddite but the homeopath and the spiritualist, the dress reformer and, now, the anti-vaccinationist, from that much quoted ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. She is out to recover and ...”

“... entries compared to Germaine Greer’s one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P  Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that Jerry, a Newbury road-protester, planned a firebombing campaign. I know Jerry. He was the victim not the perpetrator of ...”

“... the suppression of working-class speech over the centuries. Harrison himself, believing with E.P. Thompson and other historians that ‘the dumb go down in history and disappear’ and that ‘the tongueless man gets his land took’, determinedly departs from that silent heritage: for him,                           the job ’s ...”

“... to steal, and is told he is destined to hang. Dickie has little time for the Marxism of the E.P. Thompson era, but many of these (uniformly unfunny) courtroom jests recall the world of Albion’s Fatal Tree, with its smug, self-interested judges and their crushing response to property crime. Wit usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate ...”

“... last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was working ...”

“... widow still lives, aged 90, but was never a Muggletonian.) At about the same time, E.P. Thompson, who was already interested in the Muggletonian legacy, found his way to Noakes’s apple loft. He had been directed there by Noakes’s son-in-law, who had been alerted to Thompson’s interest through the ...”

“... an acerbic review of Walmsley’s book whose anonymous author was later revealed to be E.P. Thompson. In The Making of the English Working Class, the second edition of which was published in 1968, Thompson depicted Peterloo as a bloody class conflict orchestrated by the magistrates and, most likely, by the Home ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Newgate Prison’s accounts of the lives of those about to be executed, they represent, as E.P. Thompson said, ‘the lives of unremarkable people, distinguished from their fellows by little else except the fact that by bad luck or worse judgment they got caught up in the toils of the law’. It’s hard not to read the accounts without a sense of ...”

“... seemed the perfect answer. His analysis draws, of course, on the seminal work of E.P. Thompson, Douglas Hay, J.M. Beattie, and others who have shown how judges used their discretion to banish persons who might well have been hanged. ‘The Liberties of a free people,’ wrote William Paley, ‘permit not those precautions and restraints, that ...”