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“... In​ the early 18th century, Bordeaux was a rapidly expanding and prosperous city. Its riches derived from the business of slavery, and the city changed to accommodate this business. The port was renovated to make room for the large ships travelling to Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Domingue; work began on what was to be the magnificent Place de la Bourse on the Garonne and on the new merchant houses and shops for the luxury trades ...”

“... of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian. I had recently finished a book on Edward Long, slaveowner and author of the celebrated ...”

“... Around​ 1800 William Macpherson, the 16-year-old son and heir to the chief of Clan Macpherson, decided to try his hand at planting in the West Indies. The family had been Jacobites and urgently needed to repair their finances. His father, Allan, had failed to make a fortune in the East Indies and William knew he had to make good. They had kin on his mother’s side, Frasers, living in Berbice in Dutch Guyana, and so the West Indies seemed the next best possibility ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom ...”

“... incarceration and sexuality was also derived from his own sometimes very raw personal experience. Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects begins with a detailed explanation of her own investment in the mid-19th-century symbiosis between colonial Jamaica and reform-minded Birmingham. The daughter of a Baptist minister father and a ‘budding ...”

“... The Kelsalls and Davidoff and Hall are worker pairs who have been looking into the family life of a restricted group over a halfcentury or so, using a wide range of the documentation generated by their subjects. Both groups studied were experiencing insecurity. The Scottish families were of landed class, made insecure by sudden changes in politics and in the control and policy of the Church; the English families a century later were of the emerging middle class, busy creating niches in the professions and in the world of manufacturing business ...”

“... Vickery’s other main target is the argument, advanced most recently and influentially by Catherine Hall and Leonora Davidoff, that the political, social and economic changes of the last third of the 18th century contributed to a widening separation between male and female spheres, between public and private. I share many of her doubts on this ...”

“... her monumental Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, written with Catherine Hall and published in 1987. It would be good to know more about family traditions among labourers in the 19th century, but their lives have left fewer traces and Davidoff admits that her decision to leave out the working classes was largely ...”

“... discourse and law in the Jamaica controversy. He is troubled by the verdict of historians such as Catherine Hall and Stefan Collini that the organised attempts to bring Eyre and others to justice had, in Hall’s words, absolutely no effect. I doubt whether this is the real issue. Practically everything that happens ...”

“... concerned with France in the 19th century’ is the editor’s description in the introduction. Catherine Hall is allowed to contribute one chapter on the English middle class in the first half of the 19th century ‘because England offers the most fully developed form of private life in the period’: but there is no discussion of ...”

“... the secret connected Mr Collins’s obsequious visits after Sunday service to his patroness Lady Catherine de Burgh with James’s weekly attendance on his patrons, Mr and Mrs Chute? If some identifications spring to mind even now, from our reading of the culled letters, far more would have occurred to anyone who knew the Austens and their circle, whether in ...”

“... field matters more than the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project. Conceived and executed by Catherine Hall and her colleagues at UCL, it has made plain the full extent of British investment in human bondage. Many people now know that the end of slavery in the British Empire, legislated for in 1833, took the form of a negotiated settlement between ...”

“... idleness, and any book that claimed otherwise would be considered a letdown. The new biography by Catherine Mayer, Charles: The Heart of a King (W.H. Allen, £20), begins by reminding people of an earlier claim, made by Jeremy Paxman, that Charles regularly instructs his cook to boil seven eggs each morning in the hope of getting a soft one. But then quickly ...”

“... zip-jacketed, jeaned, it ran past him to the road.’ This is Benjie, delinquent boyfriend of Catherine, Frank’s second eldest daughter. Catherine is ‘pale-cheeked, slim-necked, broad-browed, sharp-nosed’ – ‘pugnaciously-featured’, in fact, like Attercliffe himself. Attercliffe and ...”