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“... and it has never been out of official custody. It is the report of a royal commission ordered by William the Conqueror to conduct a stocktaking survey of the great Anglo-Norman feudal estates of his realm of England as they stood 20 years after the Conquest: a report based on the corroborative evidence of six villagers, the priest and the steward from each ...”

“... Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as a host of lesser figures, some of whom were novelists. In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams the era produced a novel of ideas that not only did without a conventional love story, but broached issues relating the individual to the state on a scale of generality that is positively Dostoevskian. Caleb Williams attacks ...”

“... self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which ...”

“... iconoclastic texts she encountered early in life, including Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and William Godwin’s Political Justice. She favoured the rights of women (perhaps as a result of reading Mary Wollstonecraft), and briefly attempted to found a Godwinian commonwealth with her brother. She had no time for received opinion, exhibiting an ...”

“... human nature to Dickens’s surprisingly thoughtful reflections on 1789, 1830 and 1848, and from William Doyle’s opening attempt to divine the ruling principles of the Revolution at one end of the book to Norman Hampson’s engagingly self-mocking attempt to draw out its lessons at the other. But a good many of the essays are sustainedly interesting, and ...”

“... William Godwin’s​ attack on aristocratic oppression in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t pull its punches. ‘Each man,’ he wrote, ‘should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it, as the general peace of society will permit ...”

“... form of Post-Enlightenment rationalism with a mystic hope of social metamorphosis inherited from William Blake. Over the next fifty years Owen sought to realise his vision in a variety of ways – as a model factory employer, as the founder of socialist communities, as a patron of trade-unionism and workers’ co-operatives, and as the sponsor of a wide ...”

“... revelations, they reinforce the impression – already given in biographies by R.P. Eckert and William Cooke – of a character of great complexity. Thomas, the eldest of six boys, was born in Lambeth 107 years ago, and was brought up to feel ‘proud of thinking that both Father and Mother came from Wales.’ The remark implies displacement as well as ...”

“... of which British poets should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating things to say about the centuries that ...”

“... that determine character began to turn into slightly better grounded talk about nerves and brains. William Harvey discovered how the blood circulates in the human body. There was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of ...”

“... between Malthus’s invocation of nature to recommend social inaction, in contrast with, say, William Godwin’s active interventionism. In fact, Malthus was a true guru of evolutionary theory. Darwin explains in The Origin that, in part, his theory ‘is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole of animal and vegetable ...”

“... am of course delighted to have you publish my books,’ he writes to his British publisher Tony Godwin, ‘and I appreciate greatly your desire to launch them with flame and thunder. More than once, however, I’ve seen writers ride bicycles on the high-wire, eat fire, gash themselves open to call attention to their books. They end up with little more than ...”

“... and of complaints kept at bay. Like the previous modern biographies by R. George Thomas (1985) and William Cooke (1970), but slightly more so, Wilson’s book is really the story, despite her equivocations, of Thomas’s despair; and then of the remarkable and brief late flowering and flaring of his poetry, with his untimely and now famous early death at Arras ...”

“... staff members as well – notably the columnist Conor Cruise O’Brien, the financial writer William Keegan, and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions attached to the sale of the paper. But Rowland is a very determined character – as ...”

“... does well on late-night television and inspires agonised polemics in the Sunday supplements. Fay Godwin. Fay Weldon. All the Fays. There is concern at the Palace. Even the Cabinet war-council is cruising for some green relief, some planetary crisis to get them off the hook. Publishers have only to bring into focus all this universal, non-specific weather ...”