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“... social change, became to monarchs and parliaments alike the arbiter of controversy: Cotton, as Mr Sharpe shows, became to monarchs and parliaments alike the arbiter of controversial historical evidence. A distinguished 18th-century antiquary recalled without exaggeration that Cotton had been ‘consulted as an oracle by the privy councillors and greatest men ...”

“... particular attention as guides to, or even determinants of, the period’s intellectual systems. Kevin Sharpe’s book centres on ‘the richest archival source for the study of reading in early modern England’: the voluminous notes which a country gentleman, Sir William Drake, from Amersham in Buckinghamshire, took on his reading before and during ...”

“... also in that it contains a prodigious amount of work. All the familiar sources are here, but Dr Sharpe also draws on many manuscript collections which are less familiar because they are newly available or in remote places. He gives us many valuable ‘unconsidered trifles’. I will not soon forget the man protesting against militia rates who believed ...”

“... history – a fascinating piece by Valerie Pearl on ‘Social Policy in Early Modern London’. Kevin Sharpe on Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford is much in Trevor-Roper’s spirit. I greatly enjoyed David S. Katz on the problem, much debated in 17th century England, of what language Adam spoke. After some false starts with Egyptian and ...”

“... and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part in Kevin Sharpe’s admittedly already massive study of Tudor spin-doctoring. Sharpe’s subject is the considerable range of devices which the Tudor family employed as a distraction from their unconvincing genealogy: public ...”

“... evoked by the most luminous and the most penetrative intelligence at work on the British past. Kevin Sharpe’s Criticism and Compliment is dedicated to Trevor-Roper, but departs significantly from his view of royal policy in the 1630s, in which Sharpe finds no evidence of aggressive or absolutist intentions. An ...”

“... of ‘revisionism’. The revisionist historians of the Stuart period, led by Conrad Russell with Kevin Sharpe in support, have sought to persuade us that, contrary to what most English historians have led us to believe, the first two Stuart kings were on the whole a good thing, the Parliamentarians a bad thing. Perhaps even more important than ...”

“... four hundred years ahead of time.In​ his gorgeously contrarian The Personal Rule of Charles I, Kevin Sharpe argued that, royalist bias notwithstanding, Clarendon had a point when he claimed of the 1630s that ‘the like peace and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation.’ Young men preferred to spend their time in the ...”

“... whose work has set the agenda for debate on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both ...”