Angus Wilson on J. H. Plumb

“Professor Plumb is outstanding among contemporary historians in fighting this diminished scope of his chosen discipline. It is shown, of course, in the breadth of his historical interests where his editorial work and his essays demonstrate his remarkable historical range. But it emerges more powerfully in the depth of his probing, and the constantly held wide perspective in which he has studied and made his own a portion of English history – the interrelation of political and social order in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... Again and again J. H. Plumb brings to our conciousness by inference the triumphant victory of humanity in the last centuries, despite all setbacks, over material squalor, disease and brutality of manners; equally insistent is his sense of the tragic shortness of men's lives set beside their aspirations, of their persistent proneness to cruelty, to lethargy or to corruption.”

“In Robert Walpole's life he has found the exemplar of that need for political stability without which social stability is impossible; yet, as the concluding remarks upon political stability of his Ford Lectures show, he is intensely aware that this very banishment of the chaos which haunts us all, holds in itself the nemesis of an inertia upon which social instability feeds. To have maintained such profound and pressing human problems as the constant background of works of exceptional detailed scholarship has surely been Professor Plumb's own splendid answer to the urgent demand he posed in his penetrating lecture "The Death of the Past" of 1969, when he called for a renewal o a meaningful study of history in an age when the past no longer gives the old simple linear answers that helped to hold civilisation together from the age of Eusebius to the century of Karl Marx.”