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“... this aspect of the history of English life which has been re-edited and regrettably shortened by Peter Razzell. In Gough’s History of Myddle we have a unique contemporary account of all that went forward in a Cheshire parish and its surrounding district in the fifty or so years before about 1700. Here is an example of how the man writes: ‘This Richard ...”

“... These two books are important commentaries on the preoccupations of our own day. We all have expectations about the relationship between puritanism and sex, and therefore about what is likely to be found when the records of a Massachusetts county court in colonial times are searched for evidence on this matter. We are also aware that the first few days and months of life mould the personality ...”

“... Last year a book was published in Paris with the following sentences written on the back cover: Is motherly love an instinct which proceeds from ‘the feminine character.’ [une nature féminine]? Or is it rather for the most part a matter of social behaviour, varying from epoch to epoch as customs change? History shows us that the idea of motherly love is peculiarly subject to evolution ...”

“... By ‘family structure’ many things may be intended. I shall take it here in two senses. First, in the sense of composition of the co-resident domestic group, as the historical sociologists call it. This means the knot of persons who live together, man, wife and sometimes, but by no means always, their children, their relatives, if any, along with their servants, now excessively rare ...”

“... China is a poor country. In 1978 the World Bank estimated that gross national product was no more than $290 per person. Yet everything which happens in China is inevitably important if only because the country is so very, very big. The Third Census of the People’s Republic, taken in July 1982, recorded 1,031,882, 511 Chinese, including, we may notice, the 18 million in ‘Taiwan Province’ and five and a half million in the ‘Hongkong and Macao Region ...”

“... is the case with this collective study of bastardy. The authors, together with their conductor. Peter Laslett, have shrunk from the simplification necessary to communication: their concern for absolute accuracy has paralysed them. This is not a new attitude: we had grown used to it from scholars of the past. It is intriguing, however, to discover ...”

“... this group of studies lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until ...”

“... have come of age. The work of two generations of researchers, led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry. The modish topics ...”

“... term ‘youth’ to cover from 20 to 50, a reminder of the economic importance of muscle power. Laslett’s approach is similarly related to function. He sees the first age as one of dependence and training, the second of economic activity, the fourth of physical deterioration and renewed dependence: but before that he claims that there is a new feature ...”

“... and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social ...”

“... and pre-industrial England, particularly with regard to family life and population levels. Laslett prefers to call the new approach it exemplifies ‘social structural history’, rather than sociology. He dismisses any exclusively economic interpretation as sterile, and believes that ‘certain features of Marxian historical sociology’ have been ...”

“... lives, talk and attitudes of the vast majority of the population in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of ...”

“... and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by Watt’s ambitious, analytical ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... by two years.) In places he unnecessarily diminishes his own subject, reflecting in the manner of Peter Laslett that every society contains a degree of conflict, and that occasional expressions of it are a matter of routine. Well, of course, it all depends on what we mean by politics. If, like Hobsbawm, we regard as political only actions which are ...”