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“... In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on Thackeray by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning of the naughty bits) and chose as ...”

“... Men everywhere supposed (as A.J.P. Taylor tends to begin sentences) that he would join in the general execration of Lord Dacre over the Hitler diaries. A lot of men, indeed, were looking forward to this: historians wrestling in mud is a common spectacle that never loses its power to give pleasure – like dissent between taxi-drivers ...”

“... government would have handled the Falklands crisis with greater skill and to greater effect. Michael Foot speaks in the tones of Churchill in the Second World War and of Lloyd George in the First. It is fair to say that these two statesmen have often been numbered among Michael’s heroes. Still, I never expected to ...”

“... formidable figures have recently announced their unshakable faith in nuclear armoury. Professor Michael Howard tells us in the columns of the Times that the peace of the world will be imperilled if we relinquish nuclear weapons. Field-Marshal Lord Carver, I hear, is writing a book preaching the same doctrine. These are authorities whom I much respect. It ...”

“... as well as money. No one asked A.J.P. Who? Such tensions are worth exploring; and the more A.J.P. Taylor’s life is explored, the more tensions are disclosed. When he wrote his autobiography, he proposed to call it ‘An Uninteresting Story’, doubtless suspecting that his publishers would veto this proposal (as they duly did). Whatever else it was, the ...”

“... the extraordinary sums of money involved,1 were quickly followed by the prosecution in Britain of Michael Collier. Chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the largest securities firm in the City of London, for making an instantaneous profit of £15,000 on the purchase of shares in a company he knew was about to be taken over. A steady series of cases involving ...”

“... I can settle to a collection of diary pieces from our most distinguished modern historian, A.J.P. Taylor. Of course these are not real diary entries. A real diary entry is full of personal items which the law of libel or the proscription of the totally trivial contrive to rule out. Journalism diaries have to be compiled on principles of their own. Names can ...”

“... would have been quite so ebullient about it if I had known what I know now, after reading Geoffrey Taylor’s riveting book, is another matter entirely. To be sure, I knew that the dear old Grauniad was not exactly flush – my new salary would have told me that even if I hadn’t noticed that one of my future colleagues pinned his bus-tickets to his expenses ...”

“... Ofqual’s way of dealing with public opinion was to hire a PR firm run by former associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, in a contract awarded without a process of competitive tendering.When the A level results were published on 13 August, 39 per cent of teacher-predicted grades had been revised downwards. The resulting furore – including a ...”

“... I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For ...”

“... it is still possible to work aloft as a topman, encountering many of the same dangers as Stephen Taylor’s subjects did – but few of those who write about seamen have ever gone aloft on a dirty night to lay out on a yard and hand sail. There is at least one modern authority (Sam Willis) who deliberately went to sea in square rig to learn the trade of a ...”

“... with a scene of this kind, although the piece of meat in question is called Sandie, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. That is, unless she is called Ellie, and played by Thomasin McKenzie. I can explain this bit without spoilers. The story begins quietly, as should all stories that ultimately shriek. We are in the present. A young girl, Ellie, is dancing in her ...”

“... in the morning until midnight, it hosted meetings addressed not just by usual suspects such as Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Kenneth Tynan, the publisher John Calder, Doris Lessing, Michael Redgrave and Wolf Mankowitz, but also such distinguished figures as William Empson. ‘Events’ were held in the basement where ...”

“... tells us that ‘the raging sea boils.’ You could say that, and you could also say, as Richard Taylor does in his book on the film, that Eisenstein is showing us what moving pictures alone can do by way of representing reality, is remembering all the shifting, unfaked water in the work of the Lumière Brothers, for example. Or you could just watch the ...”

“... of rebellion is depicted in many novels and films, from Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin to Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of July 1944 understood that their plan to murder Hitler and stage a coup was unlikely to come off. Instead of success, there would be the recorded fact that they had tried. They played ...”