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“... works in the process of being published by Harvard University Press under the editorship of Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers. Filled with his affectionate concreteness, and often solicitously conversational in tone, the philosophical essays are meant to be anti-intellectualist, in so far as ‘intellectualism’, a term he uses with some of ...”

“... In a world where dockers vote Tory and Cambridge graduates become KGB colonels, predicting class behaviour is a chancy business. Let me conjure up a still more incongruous example. Conceive a manor-born gentleman, with a private fortune exceeding £30,000 in the 1840s, respectably Whig and with a family dislike of fierce radicalism. He is Cambridge-educated and until recently a prospective parson ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... Queen Victoria​ reigned for 64 years, causing two and a half generations to be lumped together as ‘Victorians’. Had she died in 1870, rather than in 1901, it would be easier to see how little those generations had in common. Approaching the mid-point of the reign, in 1864, the historian J.A. Froude noticed that already ‘from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and Free-trade’ the change was ‘vast ...”