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“... a week out of the national climb-down? Rider Haggard’s career has already attracted biographers. Tom Pocock, while never losing sight of the man as literary phenomenon, concentrates on his half-forgotten role as visionary of Empire. Here is the man who saw in the Zulus the makings of English gentlemen (which was more than could be said for the ...”

“... age of the war correspondent as buccaneer. Although he was not at all his way inclined, it was Tom Driberg who described him (perhaps unguardedly) as ‘a trim, slight figure, dark and jaunty, with steady eyes, a scornful passionate lip and a certain ruthless charm’. Interestingly, his appeal was not universal, even among newspapermen. When he worked ...”

“... did not live to see the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle go out and govern Canada. Tom Pocock gave a good account of his career in Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (reviewed here 23 September 1993). The Diary of an African Journey tells how, in 1914, Haggard accompanied the Dominions Royal Commission on the second stage of its ...”

“... written about by great numbers of very well qualified people, from Clarke and McArthur in 1809 to Tom Pocock in 1988: this imposing mass of books, together with the place of Nelson and of the battle in the English tradition, have caused John Keegan to approach the subject with awe, and awe alas has led to a stilted, almost official kind of writing. For ...”

“... been answered in recent decades by a series of dazzling academic performances: Plamenatz, Berlin, Pocock, Shklar, Wolin, Schaar, and more recently Kelly, Taylor, Ryan, Skinner and Simonds. It is a mark of John Dunn’s distinction that this is the company in which he belongs. But in one crucial way he has outstripped his peers. For he has begun to show ...”

“... Nations and Tribes is an easy intellectual stroll. Dominated recently by the writings of J.G.A. Pocock, the history of Early Modern ideas is notoriously a zone of intricate and ambiguous exploration: the borderland of the modern age, a shadow-time entre loup et chien where nothing was in its own estimation the way it now appears to us. This book raises the ...”

“... permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking. Readers of the London Review will remember the review of a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill in which he bitterly attacked the conservatism of English poetry and criticism. Indignant correspondents retorted that Paulin’s literary ...”

“... show where republicanism ended up; Aubrey himself disliked this tactic, and felt that the poem ‘Tom May’s Death’ came down too hard on its victim. This injustice may not disprove Marvell’s authorship of that controversial text, but subsequent critics have been too ready to take such glib dismissals of the republicans at face value. As can be seen in ...”

“... chapters are concerned with the operations of that wily English rogue Daniel Defoe, and John Pocock delivers a thoughtful contribution on the relationship of the Union to the American Revolution. But the book’s two key items are Robertson’s own articles, particularly the second, ‘An Elusive Sovereignty’, in which he traces the course of the ...”

“... the age of Harrington and Nevile and Milton and Algernon Sidney – but less so in the 16th. John Pocock, the masterly expositor of the tradition, barely mentions Starkey. The Dialogue was not published until the 19th century. Was it known after its author’s death? Gordon Zeeveld argued, in Foundations of Tudor Policy, that the Marian theorist John Ponet ...”