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“... a biography, in 1959, by Edward Grierson, Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon, which Brian Thompson commends in his bibliography as ‘genial and entertaining’. His own book is as genial as the subject will allow, often extravagantly entertaining, and as shrewd as it is well-written. After forty-odd years Mrs Weldon was well worth a second ...”

“... husband came along, he emerged from the garden and, with or without premeditation, stabbed Percy Thompson 16 times. Thompson died, and so, after being sent for trial at the Old Bailey, did Bywaters and Mrs Thompson, at the end of a rope. Last year my friend and colleague René Weis wrote ...”

“... what it is like to be a child, though the occasional exceptions – Dickens, Orwell and Flora Thompson – sketch in the outline of this vast unexplored continent. Perhaps this is one reason why historians have so rarely written about childhood. And even if they do write about it – when discussing the history of education, for example – they often ...”

“... for herself and her party: ‘those were the values when our country became great,’ she told Brian Walden three years ago. The publication of these four books provides a timely opportunity for testing her claims. Historians, mostly on the left, have so far dismissed them, and even those not on the left rightly worry about the propagandist way in which ...”

“... Street then left at Hope and into Charlotte Square, the site of the Edinburgh Book Festival. Brian Parsons’s Committed to the Cleansing Flame chronicles a ritual shift coincident with the Industrial Revolution. Just as the plough and pasture gave way to the furnace and factory, the grave has given way to the cremator. And the ‘sacred remains’, as ...”

“... apricot frock’ in Quicksand (the character was based on the Black actress and model Anita Thompson, who was so beautiful that Coco Chanel gave her dresses). When Larsen was found dead in her apartment in 1964, she was wearing a black sweater over a plain blue dress and black socks. The socks, in particular, would have appalled her younger self. What ...”

“... front line of the war between the sexes. The heroine Sadie (play on ‘sad’ and ‘sadist’) Thompson (play on Maugham’s unregenerate prostitute) is so comprehensively victimised that her only recourse is to victimise herself more shockingly than even her enemies can. And with her self-inflicted wounds she is supposed to win a kind of freedom. We ...”

“... Finishing the book and the film has also given him an afternoon off on which to marry Emma Thompson, but the poor woman only rates about half a dozen mentions in this book, none of them in the sort of tone you would expect when talking about a Mrs Branagh-to-be. He even manages to drop in two references to The Magic Roundabout without appearing to ...”

“... Parliament.’ From its grey, drizzly cover to its century-long plod of standard-length excerpts, Brian MacArthur’s anthology leaves you in no doubt: there’s precious little fun to be had protesting. There’s no skittish comedy or wry subversion here: The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Protest takes a serious approach: heavy subjects, heavily ...”

“... a Test fast bowler. On the basis of this barmy idea the England football manager should bear Daley Thompson in mind for the next World Cup. His speed on the ground and power in the air could be devastating. Quite when the modern lapse into thuggery occurred is difficult to pinpoint. Was it the West Indians, Hall and Griffiths, or our own John Snow? More ...”

“... and see that world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is ...”

“... a foothold in the establishment they were criticising: in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead’ and laughing at ‘the society that had reared them’.The four cast members of Beyond the Fringe soon decamped to New York, where the revue ...”

“... thoroughly secular study of Culture and Society. In From Culture to Revolution (1968) Eagleton and Brian Wicker introduced a Slant symposium devoted to Williams and his ‘richly creative tradition of socialist humanism’. But at some point in the early Seventies Eagleton became a convert to the materialist Marxism of Louis Althusser, another former Catholic ...”

“... Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the state is on ...”

“... on Australian history was perhaps even greater than that of their British equivalents, Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rudé, since they were there at the beginning and hence in a position to shape the discipline along lines that codified the radical nationalist interpretation of Australian history. Even in his own lifetime, Bill Somerville’s hopes ...”