Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is ‘all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act,...

Each generation … rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe.