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“... has become exciting again. The long stand-off between Namierite history from above and Edward Thompson-style history from below is over, and a broader and more colourful view of the period has emerged. Much of the new historiography comes from the US and Canada, where its preoccupations – with empire and subject peoples, with law and religion, and with ...”

“... to have enjoyed good relations with the indigenous population through his Aboriginal wife, Black Mary. Howe came to pose a serious threat to the administration, and between 1815 and 1818 the British authorities in Van Diemen’s Land engaged ‘in what amounted to a civil war’ with Howe and his bushrangers. When bounty-hunters killed him outside his bark ...”

“... and who didn’t hesitate to carry that insight into the sexual domain. His feminist partner Mary Wollstonecraft applied the same thought to women’s sexual drives. Looming behind these thinkers is Rousseau, the great hero, and the greatest embarrassment, of the age’s liberationism. Sceptical of the innateness of sexual impulses, and repressive in its ...”

“... he enjoyed the sympathies of the British team on that occasion. In a Foreword to Running Free, Mary Peters OBE, British Women’s Athletics Team Manager, makes no attempt to preserve managerial neutrality on the matter: ‘Many of us considered Seb had the speed and style to win, but as Steve broke the tape those of us watching on television stood in ...”

“... so. The concept of sections of society ‘hidden from history’ is a powerful one, deployed by Thompson in his history of the working class, by many feminist historians, by Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in their best-selling works on popular culture in Italy and France, and with less publicity by hosts of local historians. Current interest in ...”

“... even as a route to socialism. His oldest brother, Bernard, became a clergyman; his oldest sister, Mary, served as a missionary in South Africa; and his brother Tom, a fervent admirer of William Morris, joined the Christian Social Union and volunteered in a boys’ home in Hoxton founded by F.D. Maurice, the pioneering Christian socialist. A high-minded ...”

“... the Dardanelles to Dakar, to Cologne, to Italy’s underbelly, to the murder of Frank Thompson), or Spender’s lachrymose sense that his (exceedingly brief) Communism had threatened to destroy his individual identity. But fairly promptly the CIA would import such heavy weaponry as Lionel Trilling, with his banging declarations that Western ...”

“... development.It was in 1945, he recalled, that he embarked on a course in classics at Queen Mary College, a successor to the People’s Palace in the East End of London. He seems to have been a docile student, happy to be guided through the works of Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek, and if he ran into problems – not unlikely for a solitary ...”

“... Aunt Li weeps a great deal but Aunt Annie has a permanent smile and likes to dress up as Queen Mary or a Cossack or a Spanish dancer – embarrassing Norman with this gear when she collects him from school. The grandfather does not talk to Norman but conducts loud, familiar conversations with God. He breeds dangerous gamecocks (frightening to Aunt Li, who ...”

“... the massive 1988 exhibition of Degas’s work, and by the publication in the same year of Richard Thompson’s magisterial primer, Degas: The Nudes. Feminist art criticism, in particular, has added richness and edge to debates about the relationship between form and meaning. That relationship is the focus of Anthea Callen’s study of the visualisation of the ...”

“... on her nest to hatch her brood; another prodigy, the subject of a famous print by Hogarth, was Mary Tofts, who in 1726 gave birth to a litter of rabbits and became so famous that Dr Johnson went to inspect. But Baba Yaga laying an egg alludes to impossibility in another way: she’s too old to have offspring of any sort, but like a basilisk, which lays ...”

“... seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime ...”

“... essays emphasise Fisher’s career as an outstanding scholar. An important paper by Stephen Thompson shows that he was also a model bishop, residing in his diocese, preaching, ordaining priests in person, generous in his charitable giving. Henry Chadwick offers a sketch of the royal supremacy that Fisher was combating, but discusses it as a matter of ...”

“... not excluding Paradise Lost (the wonder is that it hasn’t already been filmed, with Emma Thompson as the narrator and Denzel Washington in the title-role). Meanwhile, Behn’s plays have attracted stars as expensive as Jeremy Irons and Christopher Reeve, and she herself, now conscripted to the cause of postcolonialism as well as that of feminism, has ...”

“... the figures tramping the roads were the ‘simplers’, sellers of herbs for cooking and strewing. Mary Leech and Judith Vardey, mentioned in the records of the Fleet Market in the 1730s, sold ‘Phisick Herbs’ such as mugwort for ‘women’s irregularities’. Every summer, well into the 19th century, hundreds of women came from Wales and Shropshire to ...”