Search Results

“... Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to suppress. The fact that the most successful team in English football was one of the ...”

“... The Oxford History of Modern Europe belongs to a more leisured era. Its first volume, A.J.P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, appeared in 1954. Half a century later its two founding fathers, William Deakin and Alan Bullock, are dead, and their project remains incomplete ...”

“... 3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes ...”

“... Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ‘plain-folks’, patriotic Americans, individualistic, distrustful of big government and big solutions to their problems, Shindo says, while ...”

“... affectionate. Unashamed of his emotions altogether, as I sat next to him at the funeral of Alan Bates’s son Tristan when he wept throughout. I haven’t always felt so kindly, as when he wrote plays in the 1970s I was very jealous of him (as, I believe, was Pinter). He could run up a play in a week or two, generally when he wasn’t getting anywhere ...”

“... not long after their marriage (or one of their marriages) and not seeing a chair handy Elizabeth Taylor, whom I had met in John Gielgud’s dressing-room at the theatre, perched briefly on my knee.This was for me such an atypical situation that I find myself wondering whether I am recalling it correctly: did she sit on my knee or did I sit on hers? But this ...”

“... knowing full well the twists and turns in the road ahead. That’s an invitation to chaos.’Alan Blinder’s A Fiscal and Monetary History of the United States, 1961-2021 is the latest contribution to what is in many ways the same argument that Heller and Friedman were having more than fifty years ago. What should we expect of economic policy? What can ...”

“... That paper was, admittedly, bat-shit insane – and it’s insane that it got published, in a Taylor and Francis peer-reviewed journal called Cogent Open Access. But for two reasons this was less than a total coup: one, Cogent Open Access is a ‘pay-to-play’ journal, increasingly common in academia, which will publish work if you give it money; two, as ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his beliefs, his ...”

“... an exaggerated relish that suggests insecurity. In this, he was unlike the much tougher A.J.P. Taylor, who came to Oxford from middle-class Lancashire and was able to view the place with affectionate detachment. Taylor got on sturdily with his work. Trevor-Roper let himself be drawn into energy-sapping college ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”

“... In Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, Anthony Blunt instructs Her Majesty the Queen about pictures. ‘Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma’am, does not mean it is a fake.’ ‘What is it?’ she asks. Sir Anthony gingerly suggests: ‘An enigma?’ Here as in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, the figure of the spy illustrates the irreducibility of human and aesthetic mystery, the contradictions that all personalities enshrine, the confusion that no amount of pedantic energy can resolve ...”

“... both communities and made significant attempts to interpret each to the other – such as Alan Montefiore, who contributes a useful introduction to this book, and Charles Taylor – is perhaps chiefly important for the evidence it affords of deep-seated resistance to mutual understanding. Vincent Descombes’s new ...”

“... he is not unself-conscious enough to write short ones. He can no more say it short than A.J.P. Taylor can say it long. In the long sentences of Proust you can still hear the aphoristic tradition that started with Pascal. In the long sentences of Levin you can hear a tradition being forgotten. The English essay grew and flowered in newspapers and ...”