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“... sexuality and American puritanism, survives this artless evidential exposition. In his conclusion, Roger Thompson does well to quote the judgment of the man who knew the New England mind best of all, Perry Miller. ‘If we take puritan culture as a whole we shall find, let us say, that about 90 per cent of intellectual life, scientific ...”

“... books are technical studies, both propose or imply broad visions of 17th-ccntury Anglo-America. Roger Thompson, who teaches at East Anglia, has spent years – it must have been decades – studying the genealogies of 2138 East Anglians among the 14,000-21,000 emigrants in the Puritan-led Great Migration to New England of 1630 to 1640. His genealogical ...”

“... world of physicists was later to reach such a pinnacle. His slightly older contemporary William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) was even more precocious than Maxwell, matriculating at the University of Glasgow at the astonishing age of ten and becoming a professor there at a mere 22. Thompson’s scientific standing among ...”

“... madeleine. Looking at the exhibits, above all the splendidly atmospheric photographs by Roger Mayne, made me realise that the coffee house was by no means the unalloyed disaster I – as someone deeply involved in the project – have always assumed. It lasted only four years and financial disaster was narrowly averted after it closed in 1962, but ...”

“... Energies’, who carries a lifetime’s resentment of his charismatic, self-centred father, Roger. Burt spent his childhood with a crush on his young stepmother, Lucy, and cherished a vague belief that, around his 16th birthday, he would somehow inherit her, perhaps along with his father’s Mustang fastback. But ...”

“... of the land – the ‘landscape’ – must overlap with more workmanlike uses of it. Ian Thompson’s history of the Lake District is grounded almost exclusively in the aesthetic. ‘Since the Lake District is an imaginative construction,’ he argues, ‘it has no real boundaries, physical or historical.’ So he is thinking of it as a region ...”

“... political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal. From the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to Waterloo in 1815, Britain faced a ...”

“... bought a latchkey myself. I was browsing in a bookshop the other day and came across a book by one Roger Scruton about Thinkers of the New Left. It included biographical notes on these Thinkers, of whom I turned out to be one. To my excitement, I found myself described as a man of ‘considerable wealth’. This was welcome news, and I must write to this ...”

“... otherwise appealing arabesques. The object is not to display Joseph Addison’s sensibility. Sir Roger de Coverley is a charming fiction, but the charm serves an ulterior end. The Whig Addison says in effect, when presenting the Tory squire Sir Roger: ‘Charming, isn’t he? But would you trust him with ...”

“... Peculiar alliances are struck over this dislike, most notably between Taylor himself and E.P. Thompson. The two men united in their pronouncements as to the emptiness of Carpenter’s ‘individualism’, the weedy, private-income vegetarianism that he embodied, the hopeless blend of mysticism and retreatism that took the place of politics. The now ...”

“... whom one has been in open conflict.’ In an essay published in the New Statesman in 1978, E.P. Thompson took a different view, imagining Pincher as ‘a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and ...”

“... become servants, who freely chose to come to America in the hope of improving their lives. But, as Roger Ekirch now explains in his splendid new book, a very large number of migrants did not want to leave 18th-century Britain at all. These were the convicts. Historians once thought that no more than thirty thousand felons were transported to the New ...”

“... is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters. Apart ...”

“... and several more besides. In August 1873, writing to one of his favourite correspondents, Edma Roger des Genettes, he claimed that since the previous September he had read and made notes on 194 titles, and his final estimate was that he had consulted some 1500 in all – a research curriculum the like of which can seldom if ever have crossed the mind of ...”

“... sleeping with a Russian attaché called Eugene Ivanov, a regular visitor to Ward’s flat, as were Roger Hollis, head of MI5 and mole extraordinaire, and Anthony Blunt. They spoke freely in front of Keeler, she claims, about nuclear warheads. They weren’t worried about her apparently. Ward knew she was safe. ‘The only gossip was about fashions, the new ...”