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“... Everybody agrees mat the British, and especially the English, are suffering from an identity crisis. The standard explanation is loss of Empire and failure to find an alternative role. And yet in many ways it was the Empire which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties. Until about 1800 the lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question ...”

“... evidence to sustain it: but it needs to be considered against a quite different likeness which Boyd Hilton, for example, has recently painted (‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 1979). Gash has produced a finished canvas in oils and Boyd Hilton only a preliminary sketch. Even so, Gash has never ...”

“... because of the chronology he was allotted, these ambiguities become particularly pronounced in Boyd Hilton’s contribution to the series, A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846. Trenchant, vivid, massively researched and very well written, it begins in the year that saw both the formal end of what was erroneously called the ‘First British ...”

“... am an American, one of those interlopers whose contribution to British history has been, in Boyd Hilton’s words, ‘respectable at best’) – I stand at a slight distance from them. The three men honoured in these books seem cast in a common mould. All were born in the early 1940s and did DPhils at Oxford, although McKibbin arrived there from ...”

“... where the abolitionists held most sway.According to this worldview, which has been illuminated by Boyd Hilton and Anthony Waterman, true liberty was spiritual, personal and economic: it depended on hearing the Gospel, accepting salvation through Christ and assuming that the Holy Spirit moved what Adam Smith called the ‘invisible hand’ of the ...”

“... college in 1984. After a well-balanced and informative introduction by Goldman, Collini (with Boyd Hilton as respondent) explains the relationship between Fawcett and his first biographer, and shows how integral the concept of ‘manliness’ was to their affinity and to their faith in political economy. Collini’s somewhat mannered and ...”

“... in a way few historians have ever been, and sheds important light on why he refused the crown. Boyd Hilton, on Evangelicals and Providence, distinguishes between those Evangelicals who believed, with Strafford, that ‘the prerogative is to be used, as God doth his omnipotency, on extraordinary occasions,’ and those who believed, with Calvin, in a ...”

“... we’ve relativised its brazen iniquities into carnival fun. Historians like David Cannadine and Boyd Hilton argue that the system made for political stability by turning the power game of the elite into a spectator sport, thus creating the illusion of popular participation. If this was so, it’s difficult to understand why there was such a clamour ...”

“... of nature signalled an anthropological turn in Malthus’s argument, but also, as the historian Boyd Hilton put it, an ‘evangelical creep’. Some reviewers had objected to the theological implications of the first edition. Why would God make man too prolific, land too barren, and suffering a necessary condition of the world? Now Malthus could recast ...”

“... the 1832 Reform Act was passed in the House of Commons on 23 March 1831 by a single vote. As Boyd Hilton writes in A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People: ‘The decisive vote was that of John Calcraft, who . . . finding his own seat threatened with disfranchisement, spoke violently against the Reform Bill, but changed his mind at the last moment, and ...”

“... an ascendant evangelicalism: a priggish, coldly mechanical, Malthusian ethic which, the historian Boyd Hilton has shown, considered positive economic outcomes in terms of virtue, and bad ones in terms of vice. ‘A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us,’ Lamb warned. ‘We have not the courage to imagine ...”

“... the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each other. Afterwards I went to look at Rachel Whiteread’s House by floodlight. A ...”