[14] Like Soboul and Rudé (and another friend, the older historian Georges Lefebvre), Cobb is counted among the progenitors of the "history from below" school of historical analysis.

[9] He wrote with a general sense of agreement toward their Marxist historiography, but Cobb's personal approach always avoided the doctrinaire presumptions common to his French colleagues.

[9][16] Even more importantly, those individuals who captured his attention were not the usual famous names – his favoured subjects were either Everyman figures or obscure persons of unique depth.

"[6] In his books and essays, Cobb wove compelling stories from raw data: "His approach is that of the novelist or Impressionist painter, communicating, always with compassion and a total absence of solemnity, what history did to ordinary people and how they managed to survive it.

[8] Released in English as The People's Armies in 1987, the book offers a social and political examination of the armed civilian révolutionnaires, including the sans-culottes, the fédérés and numerous other paramilitaries and irregulars.

[8] Part of what separates Cobb from Soboul, Rudé, and other traditional Marxists is his view that the popular movement behind the Revolution was lukewarm and thinly spread.

[17] Cobb's approach has been described as a combination of "mistrust of facile generalization and an enthusiastic appreciation for the colorful tapestry of individual actions that make up past events.

[21] In later years, Cobb published several volumes of memoirs and observational essays, including a fond account of his childhood in 1920s-era Tunbridge Wells, Still Life (1983), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

Drawn from memories of his school years, the book tells the story of classmate Edward Ball who, at the age of twenty, was convicted of murdering his own mother.

After a fellow historian told him that he "wrote, spoke and thought like a Parisian Street urchin", Cobb called it the greatest compliment he had ever received.

[6] In addition to Soboul and Rudé, Cobb influenced many other scholars including his Oxford successor Robert Gildea[32] and the historians Colin Lucas,[33] Paul Jankowski,[34] and Simon Schama.

Bell wrote of Cobb: "Because his sympathetic insight did not extend from the monsters and opportunists to the true believers, he ended up, for all the richness of his work, presenting only one side of the Revolution.

"[29] Though controversial, Cobb is generally considered to be a writer of "formidable historical erudition",[8] and his works offer a similar appeal to students of other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and literature.

As historian Robert Darnton explains, Cobb's lushly detailed works are suffused with "a vision of the human condition that transcends the conventional limits of history writing.