Historians From England

"I’m very driven, and I think you have to allow yourself, especially as a woman, to give yourself time to write, and to treat it seriously."

"Germaine Greer first impinged on my own life in my final year as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. We women students were all gathered together in the college hall for the annual Founder's Day Feast, and as we finished eating, the principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian voice reverberating round the room. At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression."

"But my own greatest debt to the Duke was the discovery of Namier. Now here was a level of history the existence of which I had never previously suspected. I was absolutely enthralled by his use of the minutiae of personal case histories, and it seemed to me that he was a historian who was writing about real people, about human beings and not just about Heroes, great principles, ideas, and that sort of thing. I was delighted above all in his portrayal of the great Duke of Newcastle, for me the very quintessence of the anti-hero, a personage of delightfully unglorious proportions."

"Napoleon was a tyrant quite as abominable as Hitler; and the fact that he did not kill quite so many people is due merely to purely technical deficiencies. Even so, by early nineteenth century standards, he reached an unprecedented score. It is insulting to the brave Russian peasants, to the brave British and Allied soldiers, who died for the freedom of their countries, to suggest that they were on the wrong side, were deluded and failed to appreciate the merits of French liberty."

"One is constantly amazed at the arrogant effrontery and insensitivity of intellectuals. What right has Bernard Levin to sit in judgment on the opinion of ordinary and decent people? How do Lord Longford and he know, what most people will doubt, that Myra Hindley, a woman of low and calculating cunning, as well as of consummate evil, is genuinely repentant? We do not believe it. What is there "hysterical" about hatred for utter and calculated cruelty? And is there to be no compassion for the parents of children loved and cherished, the victims of these two fiends? A minimum of modesty might have induced this self-appointed pontificator of morality to have spared us his attentions in this season of good will and family love."

"I was the first female historian to present a history series on TV in the UK in the year 2000. Extraordinary. I had no idea... I did the on and said, "Can you find out who was the first?" They said, "It's you." Young girls write to me all the time to say they want to do things like me and it’s the best thing. It makes everything worthwhile. People ask, what's my proudest moment? That response is…"

"As a society we can tolerate questions when things are going well, but when things are going badly we want answers."

"One should at least be grateful to Mr Crossman for having reminded us that what socialism is about is coercion."

"Dr Wober's letter is a timely reminder of the skill employed by members of the French Communist Party in "colonizing" institutions from within. Some measure of their patient ability in this respect may be gathered from the manner in which they penetrated research organizations and institutions of higher learning during the previous régime, at a time when they had no friends in high official posts. Now, with ministers in crucial areas of the bureaucracy, we may expect to see them extending their permanent influence and patronage, this time from above. One must cling to what crumbs of comfort that remain: after 1947, the ministries that had been in Communist control for the previous three years were effectively purged. But such a purge would be much more difficult a second time."

"That David Cecil understands the work of Shakespeare very thoroughly, and cares for it deeply, I can testify not only from many conversations we have enjoyed through the years, but from the memory of lectures he has given at Oxford. A quarter of century ago, he gave a course on Shakespeare's English historical plays which brought them to life for me as no other teacher had ever succeeded in doing."

"All who know him will agree that as a man he is characterized by his gay liveliness of mind, and his robust downrightness and common sense."

"I for one (I am sure there are others) rail against the increasingly mediated world we live in, where experience comes packages and second-hand. But we must acknowledge that the majority of the global population will not have the opportunity to visit to see a 15th-centry representation of , or travel to Athens to visit the , or cross the to appreciate 's strategic importance. Nor will they have the time in their working day to sit in a quiet room and spend an uninterrupted morning reading and digesting an academic publication as academics can (sometimes)."

"His first book, The Stricken Deer, was at the same time a searching analysis of its tragic subject, the poet Cowper, and a vivid evocation of a particular phase of English life. Thus it already reveals his characteristic blend of interests. As a biographer, he has sought to bring out the unique individuality of human beings; to render the very essence of a Thomas Gray or a Max Beerbohm, a Caroline Lamb or a Dorothy Osborne. But he never neglects for long that larger social and spiritual context into which even the quietest of lives is interwoven."

"By choosing to write in a typically modern kind, the imaginative biography, he has acknowledged the stimulus of its inaugurator, Lytton Strachey. But Strachey may have sometimes sacrificed truth to literary effect; in contrast, David Cecil is exact and scrupulous. And if his predecessor's tone tended to be one of mockery, his own astringency is mitigated with humour, and his irony with charity. The compassionate spirit of his writing is in his case undoubtedly inspired by his lifelong attachment to the Christian faith."

"[E]ven though, like it or not, women occupy fifty percent of the human story genetically — I as a historian — I noticed that we only occupy about naught point five percent of official, written record in human history. But, my God, we are there."

"The book reminds us that 1789, far from being a year of hope and unity, was one already of intense disunity, and already produced features of the revolutionary years both in Paris and in the provinces: wild murders, lynchings, and decapitated heads placed on pikes."

"His style, polished, urbane, slightly ironical throughout—in short, reminiscent of Strachey's, serves him supremely well as an instrument of character analysis and as a lens through which human passions and follies may be observed with Gibbonian detachment. The Young Melbourne (London, 1939) presented the subtly drawn picture of a young man whose own temperament, half animal vigor and hard common sense, half dreamy speculation and delicate sensibility, mirrored the transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century habits of thought and feeling."

"We got on extremely well; I thought he was wonderful; the most agreeable, intelligent charming man I had met in my life... We used to see each other every day, and we talked for about eight hours every day. Endlessly... He was a very sharp delineator of character. His vignettes were absolutely wonderful."

"Lord David's artistry has fullest play wherever the human element rules supreme, as in his masterly treatment of the relationship between the young Queen and her first Prime Minister. And since this relationship happens to have been perhaps the most significant aspect of Melbourne's Premiership, the book qualifies as an outstanding political biography as well as a moving human portrait."

"The eighteenth century was the age of clubs; and Whig society itself was a sort of club, exclusive, but in which those who managed to achieve membership lived on equal terms; a rowdy, rough-and-tumble club, full of conflict and plain speaking, where people were expected to stand up for themselves and take and give hard knocks. At Eton the little dukes and earls cuffed and bullied each other like street urchins. As mature persons in their country homes, or in the pillared rooms of Brook's Club, their intercourse continued more politely, yet with equal familiarity. While their House of Commons life passed in a robust atmosphere of combat and crisis and defeat."

"Founded as their position was on landed property, the Whig aristocracy was never urban. They passed at least half the year in their country seats; and there they occupied themselves in the ordinary avocations of country life. The ladies interested themselves in their children, and visited the poor; the gentlemen looked after their estates, rode to hounds, and administered from the local bench justice to poachers and pilferers. Their days went by, active, out-of-door, unceremonious; they wore riding-boots as often as silk stockings. Moreover, they were always in touch with the central and serious current of contemporary life. The fact that they were a governing class meant that they had to govern."

"Their elaborate manners masked simple reactions. Like their mode of life their characters were essentially natural; spontaneous, unintrospective, brimming over with normal feelings, love of home and family, loyalty, conviviality, desire for fame, hero-worship, patriotism. And they showed their feelings too. Happy creatures! They lived before the days of the stiff upper lip and the inhibited public school Englishman. A manly tear stood in their eye at the story of a heroic deed... They were equally frank about their less elevated sentiments. Eighteenth century rationalism combined with rural common sense to make them robustly ready to face unedifying facts. And they declared their impressions with a brusque honesty, outstandingly characteristic of them."

"To my mind one of his finest achievements in the field of literary criticism is his theory of Emily Brontë's basic intention in Wuthering Heights. By the house and household of Hindley or filched from him by the villain Heathcliff – she means to represent the storm, the aberration from normal human nature. Whereas Thrushcross Grange, in spite of its many vicissitudes, embodies the calm, the restoration of order out of chaos, which wins in the end, after and indeed before Heathcliff's death... Emily's sympathies may have been with the storm rather than the calm, and I think they were; but it was left to David Cecil to discern the broad fundamental contrast between the two worlds of Wuthering Heights."

"Poetry is usually concerned with what is universal and unchanging in human life; novels necessarily with much that is local and ephemeral. Moreover poetry, almost like music, transcends the limitations of time by appealing to our emotions through our basic primitive sense of rhythm and harmony."

"The Whig aristocracy was a unique product of English civilization. It was before all things a governing class. At a time when economic power was concentrated in the landed interest, the Whigs were among the biggest landowners: their party was in office for the greater part of the eighteenth century."

"Good literary criticism enhances my pleasure. I read David Cecil with delight, whether on Hardy, Cowper, or the Early Victorian Novelists. The sine qua non here is still Wuthering Heights: it has the rugged but certain strength of a Beethoven symphony."

"Since life to them was so secure and so pleasant, the Whig aristocrats tended to take its fundamental values very much for granted; they concentrated rather on how to live. And here again, their ideal was not an artless one. Their customs, their mode of speech, their taste in decoration, their stylish stiff clothes, are alike marked by a character at once polished and precise, disciplined and florid."

"What is the secret of his critical gift that distinguishes it from others? Partly, I think, his individual approach, which is easy to recognize but hard to define, because it combines the qualities of the professional and the amateur. Professional in its seriousness, is technical proficiency and its regard for the subject; amateur (in the original sense) of loving or liking the subject too much to let himself be bound by hard-and-fast rules of treatment... [H]is love of literature is too strong a thing to be forced into the channel of a single theme. It overflows its banks for the mere pleasure of it – and as all his readers know, to give pleasure is one of his main objects in writing. Writing without pleasure, given and received, is dead: it is one of the essential differences between art and science."

"F. R. Leavis is more direct in The Great Tradition (1948), which is among other things a running diatribe against Janeite extraordinaire, Lord David Cecil. Leavis dignifies Austen as well as the great tradition of English fiction she originated by insisting on her moral seriousness, and accordingly, the leisured amateurism of Janeites – with their fondness for entertainment, performance and comedy – is noxious to him. His class-based attack upon Lord David, which includes charges of decadence, aestheticism, over-sophistication and evil, contains a homophobically charged gender component as well, for when Leavis casts aspersions on Lytton Strachey and the culture of Bloomsbury, he is aiming to taint Lord David by association."

"Richard Cobb was an open opponent of the methods of the Annalists. If Theodore Zeldin analysed France in their fashion, Cobb regarded sociology as "a detestable and deplorable subject that will destroy any historian who gets involved with it". Sceptical of quantification, uninterested in the rise or fall of the gentry, Cobb thought history was about the individual lives of people. His book on the revolutionary armies and his accounts of the sans-culottes, bandits and suicides made him the best-known historian of revolutionary France at a time when the methods of the Annalists had so depersonalized history that French schoolboys could no longer distinguish between an herbertist and an indulgent or between 9 Thermidor (the fall of Robespierre) and 16 Thermidor (the vote to make Napoleon first consul for life). For Cobb history was about the odd ways in which people lived or the places where they died."

"Comedy was implicit in the manner in which she [Jane Austen] told her story. Her irony, her delicate ruthless irony, was of the substance of her style. It never obtruded itself; sometimes it only glinted out in a turn of phrase. But it was never absent for more than a paragraph; and her most straightforward piece of exposition was tart with its perfume."

"England can best express her passionate will to peace by proposing something concrete to solve present difficulties. To show ourselves generous and sensible is in our own finest tradition. Cannot we, through the League, propose to offer Germany some mandate or devise other means to allow for her expansion? Even if it is only to gratify her desire for prestige, we are sufficiently proud of our prestige to sympathize with this desire. To refuse to do so is to show ourselves guilty of the same narrow, selfish nationalism that we deplore in the more reckless utterances of Fascist leaders."

"Let us announce to the League that we admit Germany's right to development and that we are prepared to concede something to procure it. An impartial commission might then draw up definite proposals. The Germans are far more likely to appreciate the advantage of the collective system if for once it is employed to assist them. They have learnt that they only get things by the threat of force: let us show them we can offer them something concrete by peaceful methods. May I repeat, except for the admittedly searching question of these Colonies, there is no reason why England and Germany should not live in perfect unity together. Let us keep calm and shape a policy in the light of the consoling truth."

"That city Oxford] is one of the few supreme monuments of European history and civilization, the English equivalent of Florence or Venice."

"Too many historical blockbusters are much admired but little read. This one really does deserve to be in the hands – not just on the shelf – of everyone who cares about history as a stimulating, entertaining, living evocation of the past."

"Richard Cobb, eschewing sociology, has brilliantly recaptured the tangled human reactions, immediate reactions, of Frenchmen to the French Revolution."

"I cannot recall a time when stories and rhymes and pictures and tunes were not for me the chief source of interest and pleasure in life. I stress the word pleasure. Pleasure has played a large part in my life; pleasure, solitary and sociable, carnal or spiritual; pleasure in the beauties of art and nature, in the enthralling variety of the human scene; and pleasure in jokes. Nothing has been included here, however interesting its subject matter, which does not also give me pleasure."

"Mr. Cobb's book is one of the most important contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution to have appeared since the war. The researches of almost twenty years have taken him on an extraordinary tour of national and provincial archives. Apart from the brief polemic by Hadengue, virtually nothing had previously been written on his subject and Mr. Cobb was exploring new territory from the start. Although no history can be definitive, it is difficult to imagine any subsequent historian going over the same ground again."

"No student of the Revolution can hope to understand the Terror without reading this book."

"He knew the French Revolution inside out, was an outstanding teacher, and wrote some of the finest English historical prose of this century."

"A British historian and deeply sympathetic observer of France gives a superb account of the human condition of occupier and occupied, primarily during World War II. He fastens on the gradations of differences among regions, classes, types of people. A wise and evocative book, "a private chronicle of war and occupation," perhaps a trifle too kind, too understanding of both parties. Cobb rejoices in every moment of privacy, of sexual escape, in anything that defies coercion and "the iron demands of the military collectivity.""

"In visual imagination, caustic caption, uncensorious appropriation of the human, breadth of sympathy, occasional excess and unfailing rationality, these essays are the captichos of Richard Cobb. He is the Goya of our craft. No social historian could want more."

"Richard Cobb's new book is a valuable and highly original addition to the growing volume of studies now being devoted to the French Revolution as seen 'from below'. No other writer in the field has so extensive a knowledge of the sources, Parisian and provincial, none has the same degree of wide-ranging erudition; moreover, the book is presented in the highly personal style with which Cobb's readers have become familiar: pugnacious, witty, irascible, irreverent, tendentious, impressionistic, and shot through with occasional passages of arresting brilliance. The familiar bêtes noires are here again: sociology, economic historians, 'scientific' history, Robespierre ('the Pope of the Supreme Being'); and a new and greater villian is added to round off the list: Napoleon, whose Empire is described 'France's most appalling régime'. In short, the reader, even though his hackles occasionally rise, will never be bored and is most likely to be both entertained and instructed."

"He has got to the roots of things, to find out what ordinary people thought, what actually happened, and what life was like for the French people affected by great events."

"Even now the [French] Revolution is often considered in its own self-image: as a single vast occurrence, a transformation in the order of things, whose effects were felt throughout society, and whose causality lies deeper than the will of individual men. There are historians who protest against that monolithic conception—Richard Cobb, for example, who unceasingly reminds us all of the waywardness, indifference, and mute attentisme of the provinces during the Revolutionary years."

"Richard Cobb has long since proved himself incapable of writing history that is either orthodox or dull. Whether his subject is the French Revolution or the twentieth-century scene, his work bears the stamp of an idiosyncratic spirit; he is always present, an erudite and ironic tour guide, inviting us to poke into nooks and crannies of the past and evoking the shades of people and events from his own experience."

"One has come to expect from Mr. Cobb's work a combination of erudition, verve, originality and eminent readability and those who approach this volume with these expectations will be in no way disappointed... The result is a work teeming in humanity and with the infinite variety of a Breughel canvas."

"Instead of systems and abstractions, this latter-day Diable Boîteux lifts the thatch off the cottage, peeps through the dirty windows of the septième étage and shows us not merely what happened, but what it felt like to be a sans-culotte. This calls, not merely for great erudition, but for imaginative writing of a high order, and the reader is disappointed in neither. Mr. Cobb's style, always picturesque and concrete, is at its best when he lingers with affectionate irony over the people who appeal to him so much."

"The 1970s saw Richard at the peak of his powers and influence. Books now appeared with indecent regularity – Reactions to the French Revolution in 1972, Paris and its Provinces in 1975, Tour de France and A Sense of Place, both in the following year. The first two works continued to reveal that unique, narrative style, always laced with a malicious sense of humour. But what makes them unique is the intimate knowledge of the France he was writing about. Richard's history was experiential, complicit, compassionate, at least for life's victims; it was certainly not 'objective'."

"It could be argued of course, quite persuasively in fact, that Richard Cobb had to get out of history and its particular ideological corsets in order to realise his distinctive literary talents. He carried with him, however, that experiential, inquisitorial, almost psychological approach that characterises the best of his history writing. He was superb at conjuring up images of his past, of uncles and aunts, and the eccentric characters which inhabited his very English version of 'Fern Hill'."