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“... joke, a book to go with the pretty china on the dresser. So one is almost too grateful to turn to John Yeoman’s and Quentin Blake’s The Wild Washerwomen, and should say at once that the drawings show no astounding virtuosity in the re-creation of textures, that the words have no overtones of poetry, that it aims only to tell a funny story with a ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... a voice at the start assures us that Robin Hood robbed the rich to feed the poor. But when Little John (a bear) asks Robin (a fox), ‘Are we good guys or bad guys?’ Robin hedges: ‘We never rob; we borrow a bit from those who can afford it.’ Later in the film, bad King John (a lion) tries to firm up the moral ...”

“... almost entirely for its subsistence on the landed interest. James’s Grace is a throwback, a yeoman out of the West Country who ‘brought and made a secure place for pre-industrial England in the iron and steel of the Victorian Age’. Which is all very fine, except that there is something decidedly iron-and-steel also about a cricketer who chose as ...”

“... mainly rooted in the land and in the local communities: the Smorthwait brothers were gentleman and yeoman-farmers, one of them served as a high constable and as a grand juryman at quarter sessions in the 1670s; their associate Edward Bainbridge was another yeoman who had served as constable in one of the townships in Kirkby ...”

“... With Yeoman Hague’s election pledge to ‘keep Britain independent’ and ‘give us back our country’ still echoing around the LRB office, a press release arrives on the Short Cuts desk from those brave crusaders against all things metric, the British Weights and Measures Association. There is apparently to be an appeal against the recent ruling that it is illegal to sell fresh food in imperial measures – good news for ‘Metric Martyr’ Steve Thoburn, the Sunderland market stall trader fined for selling his bananas in pounds and ounces ...”

“... What are yow​ worthe in goodes if all your debtes were payd?’ John Tanner was asked in 1620 when he appeared as a witness at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live ...”

“... mania of H.J. Massingham, the neo-paganism of Llewellyn Powys (brother of John Cowper), the symbolist nostalgia of Mary Butts, the Marxist version of village life offered by lesbians Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Luddite organicism of Rolf Gardiner and the yeoman-patriotic creed ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have ...”

“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”

“... This is not how things were done when we were at the schools.’ This is not John Major yearning to get back to basics: it is Pope Innocent IV writing to the schools of Paris in the middle of the 13th century. There is nothing new about politicians aching to stick their noses into the management of education, nor about their belief that because they have received education, they know all about it ...”

“... will take its place alongside Gladstone’s diaries, the letters of Carlyle and Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill’s collected works as an indispensable resource for understanding the Victorians. With the possible exception of Adam Smith, there can be few economic gurus who have been so vulnerable to sustained political hijacking by left and right. From the ...”

“... revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ...”