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“... Most of its 27 biographies originated as book reviews and – in the tradition set by A.J.P. Taylor – they reappear without footnotes or full scholarly apparatus, though with a substantial ‘Select Bibliography’. The newcomer gets double value from a book of this kind, for it combines surveying the abundant recently-published material on ...”

“... it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t ...”

“... his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first half of ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... vivid feel for characterisation, that of adolescents in particular, as if the first part of David Copperfield were being written today in exotic places. Paradise concludes in a fashionable aporia – its author is after all an academic – but both novels seem successfully to resist the anxieties of contemporary influence, and to behave, as it were, in ...”

“... learned journals were concerned. But help was unexpectedly at hand. I was asked by the late Basil Taylor to give some talks at the RCA, and somebody must have liked them, for I was soon on the Third Programme, which, as I daresay few remember, did a lot of book reviewing in 20-minute slots, as well as unscripted conversations about new novels and the like. I ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... more recently thought about the matter (and who do not believe, as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor now do, that in losing an encompassing faith we have lost all capacity to talk about the public good at all) agree that our own present sense of what, exactly, these two more lively kinds of argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between ...”

“... of high status all over the world look out from magnificent portraits, defying all encumbrances. David Cannadine’s study Ornamentalism wittily captures the ways the governors and viceroys of the British Empire vied with Indian rajahs and African kings in their spectacular apparel, all of them arrayed in plumes, festoons and baubles. Something about ...”

“... later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page with a turnip for a head. In 1994 England failed to qualify for the World Cup. The most important managers in English football were Scottish. Manchester United were beginning their winning streak under Alex Ferguson (from Govan); his ...”

“... than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench Division. It’s not long after Derry ...”

“... plenty of time to think, but it can be indolent to the point of nervelessness. Thus of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, he remarks: So far as I can see on an exceedingly cloudy day, I wouldn’t say she is particularly gifted as an actress. She seems, rather, to turn things off and on, much as she is told, with perhaps a fair amount of natural grace and ...”

“... lifetime is ‘the scale and speed of the collapse in religious adherence’. He quotes Charles Taylor, who argues that we now live in a world where ‘faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.’ Brown also cites with approval John Rawls’s notion of the ‘overlapping consensus’. He summarises it as follows: No ...”