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“... the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. As A. J. P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George’s platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – ‘five hundred men, chosen accidentally from ...”

“... the way Shoe might tell it, if she could write. From now on,’ he asserts, ‘I am Susan Mary Taylor, born in Oldham, Lancashire, on 26 July 1944.’ While the author has explained, in his foreword, what he means to do, nothing quite prepares one for the shock of the switch into the first person and it is only when the switch occurs that one becomes ...”

“... Rubinstein needs strong evidence to deny that Britain’s was ‘the first industrial economy’ (Peter Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or ...”

“... all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet crises. Arthur Marwick boldly opened up the whole question of war and social change. Recently a number of younger ...”

“... new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the ...”

“... the other night, where were Tennyson, Browning, Anthony Trollope, Lord Houghton, Lord Stanley, Tom Taylor, Fitzjames Stephen ... with all of whom I had a pleasant gossip.’ With all of them? But even on such a loquacious evening he still spared a thought for ‘how much better worthy of such company dear Daniel would have been.’ His own receptions, held ...”

“... Archigram was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the money, sometimes woeful, often funny, reliably coarse ...”

“... And similarly the wide readership and powerful television presence of historians such as A.J.P. Taylor, E.P. Thompson, Asa Briggs, and Cannadine himself, suggest that although history may no longer define communal national consciousness it has not lost its capacity to engage and entertain a large mass of individuals. Cannadine admits that Trevelyan was ...”

“... the swimmers smiled and shouted back: ‘Nyet.’ ‘Photos of the event reveal a comic scene,’ Peter Carlson writes, ‘the swimmers waving and cheering, Khrushchev beaming and gesturing grandly, Nixon smiling wanly, his formal white shirt buttoned at the cuffs, his sober black tie fastened tightly at his collar. He was not a man with a gift for ...”

“... McFarlane has figured in accounts of the period chiefly as the colleague and opponent of A.J.P. Taylor with whom he shared the history teaching at Magdalen. Taylor achieved the kind of fame Bruce wanted none of, but, unlike Taylor, Bruce managed without effort to acquire a body of ...”

“... yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political reality. The philosopher Charles Taylor has remarked that politics is ‘what’s going on’, or something to that effect. But how the hell are we to know what’s going on, I thought while on my way to the Trades Union Congress? What is going on is in some part what we say is going on: but if ...”

“... of incest; but also a houseful of real antiques, and a heroine who really does look like Elizabeth Taylor. Call it Indiana for beginners. The previous books have added to their allure by an aggressive approach to some of the last few taboos: gay sex (particularly when allied to violence and/or manipulation); violence (particularly when allied to manipulation ...”

“... misconception of what these maligned institutions are actually like.) Everything about Philip Taylor proclaims him a wet: second-class degree, balding, shortsighted, his wife has left him out of sheer boredom and even the University of Pittsburgh Press won’t look at his thesis on hagiography in 12th-century Northumbria. He is morbidly oppressed by his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... longer before I die – I fall to brooding about that devastating term of abuse of our times, the Peter Pan crow of complacency: Get a life. I am impressed and rather envious of those who use the phrase: that they can be so certain that they know what a life is, and so convinced that they have one. From the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it ...”