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“... and greater rigour. This was the era of Pevsner, Namier, E.H. Carr, D.W. Brogan, A.J.P. Taylor, Anthony Blunt and Noel Annan, all regular reviewers for the TLS (though the old, cosy TLS reappeared in 1946 when Russell’s History of Western Philosophy was sent to J.B. Hawkins, the vicar of Esher). May notes two milestones in the paper’s steady ...”

“... a very unusual hour”, adding that it brought “a terror to living and writing”’. A.J.P. Taylor read the whole thing at least once a year, and ranked it as OUP’s greatest publication. Aficionados regularly recite Fowler on split infinitives, as if it were Monty Python on ex-parrots. And nearly seventy years after his death, letters for him still ...”

“... Kocka, who saw the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49 as the turning point when, as A.J.P. Taylor quipped, German history failed to turn. While in other Western and Central European nations industrialisation and the defeat of the landed aristocracy were accompanied by the triumph of bourgeois liberalism, in Germany aristocracy and authoritarianism ...”

“... following the Blitz. The missing factor in Ponting’s analysis is popular patriotism. A.J.P. Taylor tells how, after the fall of France, strangers would stop him in the street and say: ‘Poor old Hitler. He’s done for himself now that he’s taken us on.’ Here was the consciousness tapped by Churchill and Priestley on the radio, a conviction that ...”

“... successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of tradition: he needed an anchor as much as he wanted a sailor. I only knew him at the fag-end of his career, when the passions had been banked down a bit. He ...”

“... after his exposure, but despite rancorous arguments and the dramatic resignation of A.J.P. Taylor, their proceedings did not lead to publications, conferences, lectures, or any of the other manifestations of a scholarly cause célèbre. One has only to compare the recent furore over Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man to see how slight the impact of the ...”

“... war they’ve just fought. It must have been a scholarly version of this syndrome that led A.J.P. Taylor to pronounce, as late as 1965, that ‘the Second World War, unlike the First, produced no distinctive literature. There were no war poets during the war, and no war novels or memoirs after it.’ You still sometimes hear this argument. One reason is that ...”

“... inhabitants. ‘In other countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people,’ A.J.P. Taylor wrote in his 1941 history of the monarchy; ‘in the Habsburg Empire peoples are a complication in the history of the dynasty.’ The new ‘modern’ political morality wanted something quite different: bonds of deep identification that could tie rulers ...”

“... would seem as mysteriously given as the planet Venus, is guilty of the offence. When A.J.P. Taylor remarked that he had extreme views but held them moderately, he may have meant, as Fish would be bound to claim, that he did not really hold them at all. He was, after all, being interviewed for a Magdalen College fellowship at the time. But he may have ...”

“... to be found, for example, in the brilliant work of Norman Davies’s own tutor at Oxford, A.J.P. Taylor, or give the reader the same tiresome sense that he is being got at in ways he cannot contest. Instead, the record of two millennia and more is bound together by an important and forgotten thesis. Celtic history, together with the sometimes over-copious ...”

“... unemployment figures mount because they lacked the economic expertise to get them down. As A.J.P. Taylor once put it, they were like doctors before the invention of antibiotics. All they could do was to prescribe rest and liquids, and take their fee. Present-day governments are in a quite different position. There is no secret about what needs to be done. The ...”

“... are routed, the friends of liberty vindicated, and all with a sparkle and wit that none but A.J.P. Taylor can match. In Michael Foot’s world the light of the romantic revolution still shines, and warm-hearted radicals rise up against tyrants and desiccated calculating machines. So infectious is Foot’s writing that after a few pages one is thoroughly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... occupies. Merely irritating is the authors’ repeated citation of the pronouncements of Mr A.J.P. Taylor – not so much, one fears, because they regard the historian as infallible (which he nearly is), but because they hope to keep on the sunniest side of the kindly critic. During the First World War there had been a divide between what were, as ...”

“... of this remains obscure, and in this volume robs us of Nigel Nicolson on Alexander, A.J.P. Taylor on Beaverbrook, Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on ...”