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“... with protecting his own turf. The writers he likes pose little or no threat – Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell: either safely senior or safely underrated by the mob. Philip Larkin used to exhibit the same tendency when asked to name his lineup: Barbara Pym, Stevie Smith, Betjeman. Larkin, of course, is the one contemporary to whom ...”

“... erzwungene Krieg (a war forced on Germany) to explain Nazi aggression. In Germany itself, A.J.P. Taylor has found few if any disciples. But even if a shadow of doubt hung over the question of Germany’s responsibility for the war, there was none whatever about her conduct of it. Goering and his co-defendants at the Nuremberg Trials made hay of the highly ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by being a ...”

“... sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in ...”

“... alive. There is still something to be said for this view, and I was reminded of it by D.J. Taylor’s snooty mimicry of textbook journalese in ‘On The Strip’, which purports to describe life on Sunset Strip, Hollywood Boulevard (‘a clotted heatscape of a place, a serpentine coil of stores and diners split in two by a wide thread of tarmac, hazy ...”

“... nothing but a misprint.’ Jimmy Breslin reckons that Runyon caught the habit either from Samuel Taylor Coleridge or from listening to hoodlums testifying evasively at court hearings. A more likely bet is that he caught it from Ring Lardner, from whom he picked up several other hard-boiled/soft-centred tricks of style. The fact is, though, that the ploy does ...”

“... In May 1977, Ian Paisley was in a television studio in Belfast when he bumped into Malachy McGurran, a leader of the Official IRA in Northern Ireland. At that time, Paisley was attempting to orchestrate a repeat of the loyalist workers’ strike that had defeated the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement three years earlier ...”

“... Thatcher, or the bombs that killed two of her closest parliamentary aides, Airey Neave and Ian Gow, provoked momentary outrage, as did those that killed guardsmen and their horses in the royal parks. A missile fired from a truck and narrowly missing John Major’s cabinet in Downing Street was met with astonishment as much as alarm. The IRA had come to ...”

“... The Monument men, such as John Nicholas Brown and Mason Hammond, were outraged. But Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, thought that ‘the American people had earned the right in this war to such compensation if they chose to take it.’ Twenty-five officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission signed a ...”

“... page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After the show, ...”

“... analysis – or rather in the conception of knowledge which this analysis presupposes? Ian Hacking holds that Foucault’s historical construction is in itself Foucault’s philosophy. Certainly it is a study of the ‘conditions of possibility for ideas’, which, according to Hacking, is precisely what we call philosophy. Hacking seems to believe ...”

“... imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya ...”

“... 1974 and to depose the likes of Heath and Whitelaw from the Tory leadership. Anyone – including Ian Paisley – who helped maintain the minority Labour government in power was fair game. Thanks to Peter Wright’s revelations we are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Wallace was the first to make ...”

“... thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed by the arrival of the Third Programme’; Edward Sackville-West in Picture Post thought that it could ‘well become the greatest educative and civilising ...”

“... operations, two of whom, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, were struck off even before Ian Kennedy’s report was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin ...”