Search Results

“... Alan Macfarlane likes to shock historians out of their complacency and out of a narrow preoccupation with their own period or their own mode of historical study. He is a professionally-trained historian and a professionally-trained anthropologist and his approach is truly interdisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary. He is also a polemicist of great power, as his demolition of the notion of an English peasantry in The Origins of English Individualism showed ...”

“... what has been coming out, and about whether some beloved work has stood the test of time’. John Morrill has identified a hungry constituency to whom his book will be a godsend. The width and depth of Morrill’s reading are awesome. How else can one appropriately respond to the book than by resolving guiltily to get up ...”

“... him. And surely, this is something; surely this is enough.’ The statement is quoted by John Morrill in his introduction to the volume of essays he has edited, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, a book, as he says, about ‘another man who rose from humble East Anglian roots to dominate his world’. Whether a substantial professional biography ...”

“... of the Elizabethan and Jacobean generations.’ The same possibility has occurred to John Morrill, who explores it in his sparkling contribution to the collection of essays which he has edited. Reactions to the English Civil War. The attempts of Parliamentary Puritanism to extinguish and replace the Anglican Church in the 1640s, he claims, encountered ...”

“... contrast between the two countries has benefited the English historians. Seeking to displace not just one but two explanatory paradigms, they have had to display greater ingenuity. The outcome has been more tough-minded and original. It has been also more various, as can readily be seen from the cluster of summa recently published by three leading ...”

“... and Lamont on religion; Hirst on the electorate; Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book ...”

“... accuracy. Behind it there lies instead the old literary model of the sleeping prince who wakes just in time, which the fiction and verse of Sidney and Spenser had used to urge Queen Elizabeth to mend her ways. What the editors of The Crisis of 1614 have enterprisingly done for that year could have been attempted for a number of other occasions in early ...”