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“... many of them based on Pliny, Aristotle and others. ‘Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century and William Cobbett in the early 19th, both of them acute observers, held the Classical writers responsible for the bulk of English rural superstitions.’ Nor was the attack on ‘vulgar errors’ a new one, a new battle of world views in the 16th and 17th ...”

“... the startling fantasist Fuseli were at the height of their powers, and that embarrassing outsider William Blake was issuing book after book of illuminated prophecy. Farington himself was not a major participant in this rich flowering: his meticulous, straight-laced art belongs more to an earlier age. But he was a great observer. Although the diary has been ...”

“... worried yet – Mitchell often took his sweet time writing a piece, and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, was never one to press a question, or even ask one in a voice above a whisper. Mitchell thought of his dream as marking the exact day ‘I began living in the past,’ but that, it could be argued, was a natural step for a man writing a book about ...”

“... outside world. Raymond Williams was not a historian, and except for his riveting little book on William Cobbett, never wrote a line of conventional historical narrative. But his intelligence was preeminently a historicising one, and it is perhaps symptomatic of this that Matthew, the fictional self he created in his trilogy, is a university lecturer ...”

“... like a ballroom without women. Then I remember foot and mouth and put out more viricide and straw. William Youatt, whose The Pig: A Treatise on the Breeds, Management, Feeding and Medical Treatment of Swine of 1847 is still the standard work on the British pig, prints many anecdotes of the docility, gentleness, affection, cleanliness, intelligence, even ...”

“... indeed the only one who was unquestionably qualified for the job. Yet Conservative MPs preferred William Hague, who should not even have stood that time round, let alone have been the winner. As the Conservative Party in the country clearly favoured Clarke, the Parliamentary Party’s gratuitous act of unilateral leadership disarmament was, so far as I ...”

“... riven with a great rainbow. By then Salisbury Cathedral had become a symbol for reformers like Cobbett as much as for Tories of all that was best and worst in England at a time when it was experiencing the most serious civil unrest in its history. Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is not a polemic: it represents a moment of suspense at a point of ...”

“... had been improved, the threshing machine had been invented, and crop rotation had taken hold. William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides – originally a column that appeared in the Political Register between 1822 and 1826 – captured the movements which created the basis of the farming world we know. Cobbett rode out on ...”

“... exemplified by Liverpool’s St George’s Hall. In the private realm, Hunt explains how, after William Roscoe of Liverpool and the Swiss historian Sismondi pointed to the middle-class virtues and culture of the republics of the Italian Renaissance, those styles promptly colonised the banks and warehouses of the merchants. Later, Flanders and Holland came ...”

“... the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ...”

“... What about the popular success of Shakespeare’s history plays, or the fame of ‘the People’s William’, Gladstone? Professor Harrison, always patiently sceptical, might reply to these rhetorical flourishes: ‘Well – what? How on earth can we tell?’ G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate once added a postscript to their study of The Common People since ...”

“... was confronted by what it experienced as a wholly new form of civilisation: writers such as Cobbett, Carlyle and Ruskin identified unprecedented change, which appeared to threaten a whole way of life. Since then, a long line of writers has emulated them, creating a genre which has become increasingly self-conscious and prone to advertise its literary ...”

“... ills missed the point. Such complaints were tired restatements of the early 19th-century radical William Cobbett’s claim that Britain was smothered by a monstrous network of corruption, which he labelled the ‘Thing’. In the 1960s, no such powerful clique of reactionaries existed; instead, the problem was the failure of Britain’s various small ...”

“... as a punishment for refusing to work). The distinction was underlined by social reformers such as Cobbett, who supported freeborn Englishmen rioting against industrialisation, but thought slavery a suitable fate for ‘fat and lazy’ negroes. The 1834 Poor Law institutionalised the deserving/undeserving distinction by imposing what it described as slavery ...”

“... Hanoverians. Then again, what had Scott been doing, or more to the point what had he been reading (Cobbett? Robert Owen?), when in 1828 he wrote The Fair Maid of Perth? He portrays 15th-century Perth as a community run by craftsmen organised in guilds, and proudly independent of the feudal lords in the countryside. Sutherland writes of Victorian racism as a ...”