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“... Alan Deacon which was published in 1977 in the volume Essays in Labour History 1918-1939 edited by Asa Briggs and John Savile. During the Twenties, the scale of unemployment benefit increased dramatically: compared with November 1920, the amount drawn by a man with a dependent wife and two children had risen 240 per cent in real terms by May 1931. But the ...”

“... small-trades social peace. This notion was popularised in the 1960s by the historian Asa Briggs, whom Vinen dismisses as an ‘academic entrepreneur’. Briggs intended his description of Birmingham, most familiar from its capsule version in Victorian Cities (1963), as a corrective to Marx and Engels’s ...”

“... by Britain in nineteen four 0’ is a couplet taken from an Occupation Alphabet and reproduced in Asa Briggs’s picture book, which coincides with a special exhibition in the Imperial War Museum. Briggs doesn’t discuss this couplet, however, as he does others (on Informers, Black Marketeering and the ...”

“... often tell you more of his character than the name itself: Arnold Goodman: A man? No, Lord God. Asa Briggs: Sir Gas Bag. Jokes for Sparrow, like the Latin epigrams and inscriptions which he so much admired, were worth labouring. It is not improbable that he took his friend Stuart Hampshire into dinner at All Souls on dozens of occasions before he could ...”

“... and speeches were made. Mr Gil Thompson, Chief Executive of Manchester Airport, cited James Agate, Asa Briggs and J.B. Priestley on the splendours of Manchester’s cultural past. Mr Thompson didn’t quote Engels. Nor, understandably, John Ruskin: ‘Manchester can produce no good art, and no good culture.’ Despite the presence at the press conference ...”

“... and most widely read historians of Victorian Britain remain G.M. Young, George Kitson Clark and Asa Briggs, hardly a triumvirate of young Turks even in their heyday. The first two were not so much Victorian specialists as Victorians. Weary of interpretations based on class, uncomfortable with democracy and dismissive of progress, 19th-century ...”

“... on later 19th-century Manchester, despite Taylor’s invitation, may (for once) be blamed on Asa Briggs, whose excellent Victorian Cities (1963) threw historians off the scent by arguing that Manchester, the ‘shock city’ of the first half of the century, had, by 1877, ‘long outgrown the days when it could be described as “a system of society ...”

“... Why does every home not have a whole wall of encyclopedias, now that we supposedly live in the Information Age? Why have they failed to establish themselves as indispensable items of furniture, against the competition of electronic gadgetry? Because they are contenting themselves with just giving information, instead of sharpening it, so that it points somewhere ...”

“... triumph over feudalism, religion yielding to secularism, and so forth. A historian such as Asa Briggs can write The Age of Improvement, chronicling the First Industrial Revolution and the maturing of the bourgeoisie that accompanied it, without any accusations of Marxisant tendencies. It has been particularly easy for English non-Marxist scholars ...”

“... for all the marvels of such tours de force as the two volumes on Birmingham by C. Gill and Asa Briggs – is strongly empirical and conforms more closely to Trevelyan’s concept of ‘history with the politics left out’ than to the totalising history demanded by Marc Bloch. With it has come the computer and cliometrics, quantification and ...”

“... there was a historian to whom the phrase ‘daunting task’ acted like a starting pistol it was Asa Briggs, who was commissioned to write an official history of the BBC. The first volume, The Birth of Broadcasting, appeared in 1961; the fifth volume, Competition, taking the story up to 1974, came out in 1995. The full series amounts to some four ...”

“... they were free to get drunk.’ Unlike the others on the shortlist, Offshore was, in the words of Asa Briggs, who chaired the judges, a roman pur: short, deep, highly crafted, about a colony of misfits in London in the early 1960s, living on boats with the ‘certain failure’ that kept causing them to ‘sink back … into the mud moorings of the great ...”

“... birth of rock’n’roll had a complicated relationship with the coming of the permissive society. Asa Briggs, in his history of the BBC, documents the struggle in which sexual freedoms and sexual norms were bent out of shape: for every permissive moment there was a shadow of the not-permitted. And so, not long before we had Orton and Entertaining Mr ...”

“... of Britain’, an expanded version of a review, published in March 1996, of the fifth volume of Asa Briggs’s History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. The first section begins by reflecting on the obligation imposed on institutional histories, especially those written by insiders, to inflate the importance of the institutions they ...”

“... phases of growth before Victoria’s accession) follows – and indeed sometimes borrows from – Asa Briggs’s classic Victorian Cities (1963). But scholars are more conscious now that such cities were never typical of the overall pattern of British urbanisation. Many resort towns grew as fast if not faster. To cover his whole period evenly, Hunt would ...”