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"After the dismission of the present worthy chancellor, the seals would go a begging; but he hoped there would not be found in the kingdom a wretch so base and mean spirited, as to accept of them on the conditions on which they must be offered."

"Much as he valued America; necessary as the possession of the colonies might be to the power, glory, dignity, and independence of Great Britain; fatal as her final separation would prove, whenever that event might take place; as a friend to liberty, as a reverer of the English constitution, as a lover of natural and political justice—he would be much better pleased to see America for ever severed from Great Britain, than restored to our possession by force of arms, or conquest. He loved his country; he admired its political institutions; but if her future greatness, power, and extent of dominion were only to be established and maintained on the ruins of the constitution, he would be infinitely better pleased to see this country a free one, though curtailed in power and wealth, than possessing every thing the most sanguine expectation could picture to itself, if her greatness was to be purchased at the expence of her constitution and liberties."

"What, then, is the result of this part of the treaty, so wisely, and with so much sincere love on the part of England clamoured against by noble lords? Why this. You have generously given America, with whom every call under Heaven urges you to stand on the footing of brethren, a share in a trade, the monopoly of which you sordidly preserved to yourselves, at the loss of the enormous sum of 750,000l. Monopolies, some way or other, are ever justly punished. They forbid rivalry, and rivalry is of the very essence of the well-being of trade."

"In the beginning of March the ministry of Great Britain had been left without a head by the death of Mr. Pelham, which was not only sincerely lamented by his sovereign, but also regretted by the nation in general, to whose affection he had powerfully recommended himself by the candour and humanity of his conduct and character, even while he pursued measures which they did not entirely approve."

"He raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation—he made me feel I was something."

"It has been remarked by a firm friend of Mr. Pelham, that, in the House of Commons, his language was often timid and desponding; and that the candour and openness of his temper, led him occasionally to depreciate the resources of the country, and to magnify the strength of the rival power. On no occasion was this remark more strongly verified, than in this debate; for, though his general arguments against any intemperate provocation of France, while the two states seemed to be in perfect amity, were sound and unanswerable, yet it cannot be denied that he made too many concessions in favour of France, and said, what it did not become a British minister to admit, that England was unable to cope single-handed with the House of Bourbon."

"My brother has all the prudence, knowledge, experience and good intention that I can wish or hope in a man."

"This seems to be the æra of protestantism in trade. All Europe appear enlightened, and eager to throw off the vile shackles of oppressive ignorant monopoly; that unmanly and illiberal principle, which is at once ungenerous and deceitful. A few interested Canadian merchants might complain; for merchants would always love monopoly, without taking a moment's time to think whether it was for their interest or not. I avow that monopoly is always unwise; but if there is any nation under heaven, who ought to be the first to reject monopoly, it is the English."

"His principles on the subject were well known; he had repeated them from year to year in their lordships' hearing, that he never would consent, under any possible given circumstances, to acknowledge the independency of America. He knew those ideas, both within and without doors, were in some measure unpopular, but he preferred the performance of his duty, and the discharge of his conscience, to every other consideration."

"Carrying both this comedy and the book's angry elegies is Hollinghurst's beautiful prose, which mixes the colloquial and the aesthetic to produce a language at once physical, lyrical and austere."

"Other reviewers have noted the strong overtones in Hollinghurst's novel of Proust as well as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, but there is a distinctly Jamesian aura that plays around the stressed and complex analogies The Line of Beauty proposes among social privilege, social transgression, economic ravenousness, and inviolable commitments to pleasures of various kinds and intensities."

"Hollinghurst moves characters between background and foreground in different sections, meticulously picking up figures, information, ideas strewn earlier to shine a different light on past and present alike: the technique of staggered information, always a mainstay of narrative, has been fashioned into something altogether more transformative, more pointed. It is woven with stupendous deftness, its internal assonances making a complex, comprehensive harmony."

"There are strong echoes of Powell and Waugh, but Hollinghurst's richly textured narrative and achingly evocative prose is masterful and his alone."

"[John Betjeman's] ability to make people laugh resounds through this book as persistently as church bells do through his poems."

"When I first came here Hampstead Heath] I was starting my second novel, The Folding Star, which is a very twilight book, a time of day I've always loved. On those summer evenings when I set out on walks, I'd often end up on a bench here, analysing the changing light and the colours. There was a lot of pastoral poetry woven into that book; I think I was filling out an imaginary landscape based on the one in front of my house."

"I was sent there Canford School] in 1967, at the age of thirteen, and at some point in my first year was issued with the OUP anthology Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold. This was my introduction to "Tintern Abbey", "Kubla Khan", Keats's Odes and many other poems which, read over and over, became and have remained a sort of inner music for me, whether purposely memorised or not. But the one of the fifteen who spoke most persuasively to my adolescent mind was Tennyson, in "The Lady of Shalott", "Ulysses" and the lyrics from The Princess; I won the junior reading competition with a passage from "Morte d’Arthur", making the most of the "sharp-smitten" clanging crags and "the long glories of the winter moon". Those effects, like many of Tennyson's best, are slightly over-orchestrated, a display of unrestrained assonantal genius, with a fascinating power of prickling the scalp, much treasured at that age, and for me never lost."

"Cities are where the future happens first."

"So, here's a prediction. If we get our cities right, we just might survive the 21st century. We get them wrong, and we're done for."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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'."

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

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

"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…"

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

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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."

"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."

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