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“... The spectacle of members of the upper class setting out solemnly and in a spirit of scientific research to study the lower classes in their natural habitat is a peculiarly Thirties phenomenon. Earlier social investigators, like the Webbs, had quarried their material at second hand from mountains of blue books, reports and statistical abstracts. Young men from the public schools, like Clement Attlee, had gone to live and work among the poor, but to help rather than to observe ...”

“... been a passive beneficiary of this burgeoning interest: the choices of its directors (especially Dorothy Sheridan, who began work at the archive in 1974) have done much to shape how we view MO’s significance. Mass Observation did its work in the period leading up to, during, and after the Second World War – an era when social democratic values had ...”

“... promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and ...”

“... imagery to be scathing, as well. Alan Badel’s Romeo brought to his mind a restless marmoset, Dorothy Tutin’s Ophelia ‘a mouse on the rack’ and Claire Bloom’s Jessica in an Old Vic Merchant of Venice, gazing adoringly but disconcertingly into Lorenzo’s eyes, ‘a sea-lion awaiting a fish’. He almost resented actors such as Gielgud, whose ...”

“... near the cottage he was renting, and this was too much for the pastoral fastidiousness of Dorothy Wordsworth. She never really forgave him: the Wordsworths had a deeply possessive attitude towards their landscape, of which many fell foul. Worse was to follow. The daughter whom de Quincey loved, Catherine, died, to join the gallery of lost women which ...”

“... abolished after the Mutiny. Nothing exceeds the raw passion of the denunciations by Burke and Sheridan and, it is often forgotten, by Adam Smith too, on the greed and duplicity of the nabobs in general, and Warren Hastings in particular. As a young man, Lytton Strachey admired Hastings and wrote a long thesis on him, while dismissing Burke as ‘an ...”