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“... historian of the Middle Ages to be published in his lifetime. But it is strange that G.R. Evans, in what is blurbed as ‘the first major biography of Wyclif to be published for almost a century’ (the reference is to the two volumes published by H.B. Workman in 1926), makes no reference to it. Evans’s title ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... Only those who are chosen are saved. In her brilliant book Augustine on Evil (1982), G.R. Evans comments sadly: ‘Augustine’s developing conception of how God helps us to know him gradually blotted out any notion that man might contribute to his own salvation by trying hard.’ This cruel ‘double predestination’ became 17th-century ...”

“... 20th-century British Empire felt obliged to turn anthropologist and make space for large chunks of Evans-Pritchard on the Southern Sudan. This is not meant as negative criticism. If the rulers of ‘Britain’ in the 16th century had known all that Brigden knows, and shares with us, they might not have committed the atrocious acts which became literary ...”