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“... one such article was ‘Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy’, published in 1957 by Victor Kiernan. Professor Kiernan has many historical interests, and he moved on to The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (1966), and The Lords of Human Kind (1969), a discussion of 19th-century European attitudes to ...”

“... Victor Kiernan is here presenting essays produced over the last 45 years: the texts are only occasionally given recent additions. The topics include three essays on literature but are otherwise historical: on English patterns of protest, the expansion of literacy among working men, political aspects of religion, and Communist activity in the Thirties and after ...”

“... Shakespeareans has been making of the critical upsets of the Eighties and Nineties. Alongside them Victor Kiernan’s Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen – first drafted in the early Fifties, by a historian who has remained a non-combatant in the debates to which Foakes and Vickers appoint themselves as respondents – appears as a last stray blossom from the ...”

“... dangerously close at times to suggesting that drinking and smoking are all right in moderation. Victor Kiernan would be incapable of saying anything so trite. But his book is the record of a long farewell to a much-loved addiction, and he has not permitted his change of heart to make him into a fanatical opponent. The population is praised for puffing ...”

“... talking about fighting duels. The subject has recently attracted some fine historians. In 1988, Victor Kiernan published The Duel in European History, a thoughtful account that drew mainly on British and French evidence from the Early Modern period and presented the modern duel as an aristocratic residue. Five years later, Friedhelm Guttandin offered a ...”

“... I adore war,’ Julian Grenfell reported to his mother from the Flemish trenches in 1914, in a letter which she proudly sent on for anonymous publication in the Times. Stalking Germans through the mud was not very different from stalking partridges, as he noted in his game book: ‘November 16th; 1 Pomeranian. November 17th; 2 Pomeranians.’ Two decades later in Spain, Julian Bell informed his mother Vanessa that the war in which he was serving as an ambulance man was ‘perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society ...”

“... we, in short, really see duelling as a by-product of aristocratic dominance, as a mark of caste? Victor Kiernan’s answer in this intriguing and invariably well-written book is an emphatic and unsurprising yes. Kiernan is both a Marxist and a student of Antonio Gramsci. Like the majority of British historians who ...”

“... an idealistic minority rather than to the mass of capitalists.’ A good example of an idealist is Victor Schloecher, son of a rich porcelain manufacturer, whom we hear of in the later stages of France’s move towards emancipation. Capitalism could make use of, or could do without, ‘colonialism, monarchism, racism and slavery itself’: a far-reaching ...”

“... injustices around them. But often people don’t want to be reminded too much of their own misery. Victor Kiernan once wisely remarked that if class consciousness has historically always been weaker among the exploited than the exploiters, one reason is simply that it is too depressing to live with the constant thought of one’s own ill fortune – some ...”

“... are the novel sects that sprang up out of Western intercourse, hybrid faiths, one of them with Victor Hugo ensconced in its pantheon. Possibly the same receptivity, of a people perpetually forced by necessity to innovate and borrow, helped to make Vietnam in our century so open to Marxism. But the events of the French occupation may suggest that popular ...”

“... the same impulse. MacLachlan recounts an incident from the days of the Historian’s Group when Victor Kieman challenged the proposition, set forth in a paper by Hill, that Early Modern England was a feudal society. At the next meeting, after a carefully orchestrated counter-attack, Kiernan recanted his views and ...”

“... of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages and Conquerors’ should have stuck to the subcontinent which he knows well instead of skipping round the world and across three millennia. It may be this diachronic range that makes Arabia ‘half empty’ on page 194 but ...”