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“... Russell Burlingham – found this subject difficult to discuss in 1953. So, even now, does Brian Taylor, but he has treated it with delicacy and understanding. If Forrest Reid was ‘a case’, Taylor shows that ‘a case’ is in itself a crude simplification of a life. All ‘cases’ are different: Reid was ...”

“... I wearied of board games. Monopoly has always seemed to me a social catastrophe. A year ago Brian Taylor, my first cousin once removed, invented a game called Kensington which was beyond me, though I hope it rewarded him. Now I am offered a book of Sandhurst Wargames,* which extends from the Middle Ages to the Second World War. These are games I ...”

“... occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the military operations per se, but excels in ...”

“... to be ‘judgmental’. Reviewers are paid to be judgmental, and few are more judgmental than D.J. Taylor. Writing in the Independent during the present run-up to the Booker Prize award, he asks: ‘Where, in any international literary framework, is the British writer who matters?’ Not one, he suggests, can stand comparison with Marquez, Kundera, Tom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Malcolm Bradbury is a self-conscious progressive, but he writes the old kind of history. D.J. Taylor is a self-conscious reactionary whose book is a rather strange example of the new kind. Taylor’s belief, set out bluntly in his introduction, is that no modern English writer can ‘hold a candle’ to Dickens or ...”

“... I’m a monster.’ The biography he authorised and checked – Hitch by his friend John Russell Taylor – appeared two years before his death on 29 April 1980 to contradict this idea, and, for all its blandness and sparseness of reference, brought much information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man himself’. Now Donald ...”

“... virtue is gilded. Benjy, Diana’s father, is idealised to the point of cloyingness. Since 1980, Brian Aldiss has been thrashing around somewhat. We have had a rewrite of Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau, a text which, together with Frankenstein (which he also rewrote), Aldiss conceives as central to SF’s evolution. In the same year he published the very ...”

“... says, and was ‘outside the group of leading Republican strategists’. Two informers stand out: Brian Nelson and the agent known as ‘Stakeknife’ (his identity has never been verified, but is suspected to be Freddie Scappaticci). Both were recruited by the FRU: Nelson to infiltrate the Ulster Defence Association, Stakeknife to infiltrate the IRA. In both ...”

“... concepts to which the words can be attached. In The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, Brian Cantwell Smith tried to explain this by comparing a map of the islands in Georgian Bay in Ontario with an aerial photograph showing the islands along with the underwater topography. On the map, the islands are clearly delineated; in the photograph it’s ...”

“... the Government of Northern Ireland and the RUC by arguing that the Minister of Home Affairs (Brian Faulkner) ‘had no idea’ that the techniques were illegal. The fact that someone of Gardiner’s legal eminence should employ such an obviously invalid argument demonstrates ‘the extent to which Northern Ireland was clouding British thinking’. This ...”

“... Most of its 27 biographies originated as book reviews and – in the tradition set by A.J.P. Taylor – they reappear without footnotes or full scholarly apparatus, though with a substantial ‘Select Bibliography’. The newcomer gets double value from a book of this kind, for it combines surveying the abundant recently-published material on ...”

“... and creative professions to unite in technological progress. Following a chance conversation with Brian Walden in 1973, Benn created ‘The Twenty-Five Club’, attempting to commit the Labour manifesto to renationalisation of the 25 leading companies in the UK. In 1980, a throwaway remark by a Tribune supporter on the difficulties of Lords reform led Benn to ...”

“... is … staying alive. They are a comic duo called Lemon and Tangerine, played with great relish by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Their stylistic home is more like Sesame Street than Monty Python. As you will gather, this film is not looking for tonal consistency. The two men are much given to violent, insulting ...”

“... As Brian Barry suggests, the question of justice arises when custom loses its grip; when the prevailing social myth and what Stuart Hampshire calls its ‘fallacy of false fixity’ – that relations cannot be other than they are – is exposed. This is not to say that new fixed entities are never then proposed to replace the myth ...”