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“... In the Sixties J.H. Plumb euphorically announced the death of the ‘past’ – that comforting mythology conjured up to serve the present and make sense of things as they are – in the face of an advancing scholarship which was real ‘history’ and which depicted things as they actually were. The announcement was premature, and the distinction less clear-cut than Plumb assumed ...”

“... In a book as lively, as diverse and as rich as the society it describes, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and their joint mentor, Sir John Plumb, have gone far to rectify this omission. Moving from pots to strops, McKendrick explains the varied entrepreneurial skills of a tycoon, Josiah Wedgwood, and a comparative ...”

“... very much among the muses on Helicon and that the power of the past is no less than when J.H. Plumb began to toll its knell. Why and how we change the past – the third part of the book – is an individual as well as a collective matter, a conscious as well as an unconscious process. At the individual level, autobiographical confession provides generous ...”

“... time’. The conventional wisdom of the Whigs was repackaged for a modern audience by J.H. Plumb during the 1960s. Plumb redirected attention towards the patronage systems that had secured political stability in the first third of the 18th century. For him, Jacobitism’s primary significance lay in giving Whig ...”

“... of the kind Eagleton now favours. Only one famous historian came out on Carpenter’s behalf: J.H. Plumb. In an essay reprinted in his collection In the Light of History (1969), Plumb surveyed the world of Edwardian cranks, mystics and nature freaks, and gave his opinion: ‘they were right.’ History continues to be the ...”

“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”

“... bears her name. He acknowledges a heavy debt to established scholars in the field, notably J.H. Plumb, Geoffrey Holmes, G.V. Bennett and Henry L. Snyder, and the extent of the debt is very evident in the book. But he is also his own man, able to draw upon his own published articles and unpublished London PhD dissertation, and a well-stocked armoury of ...”

“... Change and History. The present work comes with handsome puffs from the eminent. Professor J.H. Plumb describes its author on the jacket as both ‘a political philosopher with a most acute analytical mind’ and ‘a scholar of very wide and precise scholarship’. Of its width there can indeed be no dispute: from Hesiod to the Jonestown massacre, if not ...”

“... A small news item with a large history behind it: John Sylvester, an inhabitant of Lancashire, was released last month from a life spent in mental hospitals and institutions, aged 81. He had been incarcerated when he was six years old, and his offence had been the stealing of an apple. His mother had died soon after this first confinement, and so when declared ‘mentally fit’ in 1929, he became the responsibility of his father, who was disabled and could not take up his case ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and ...”

“... Historian’ (1949) is as the title suggests both narrow and concise. The sketch by a pupil, J.H. Plumb, published in 1951, is a survey of the books rather than the man. Mrs Moorman, herself the biographer of Wordsworth as well as a loyal daughter, rightly considers this is not enough, and has retrieved letters, chiefly early and chiefly to his brother, the ...”

“... early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the olympian grandeur of Owen Chadwick, the stylish verve of J.H. Plumb, the cosmopolitan allusiveness of E.J. Hobsbawm, and the impassioned radicalism of Christopher Hill. Some have criticised his work for being too bland, for lacking analytical bite, for being more concerned with experience than with explanation, for relying ...”