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“... 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 ...”

“... Chamberlain) have statues in the lobby of the House of Commons: Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Attlee. The inclusion of Joseph Chamberlain seems rather odd unless it be meritorious to wreck first the Liberal and then the Conservative Party. But let that pass. Now it is proposed to put up a statue of Stanley Baldwin, three times prime ...”

“... relocating unemployed men and their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which ...”

“... head towards the sea and feet towards the mansion. One month after I left, rebels under Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) invaded from neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire and rapidly occupied 90 per cent of the country. Less than a year later, Doe himself met a gruesome end and Prince Johnson achieved a fabulous notoriety.Johnson, a ...”

“... evasion, moderation, hesitance and deflection.Recent events, most obviously the murder of George Floyd, suggest the pressing need for a confrontation with the deep history of institutional failure to act in the wake of spectacular racial violence. This negative impulse has a long lineage, as do its characteristic patterns of response: eventual ...”

“... At​ Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral – which started fifteen minutes late, in deference to her own habitual lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends ...”

“... now both dead, and ‘Michael Innes’, still alive. We had dinner in a private room at the George restaurant, now also dead. Halfway through dinner the waiter asked to speaks to me in private. Then he said: ‘I am a respectable married man and if that gentleman comes out again I shall go home.’ I expostulated with Tom, who restrained his curiosity ...”

“... When the London Review of Books began to run a Diary in 1982, A.J.P. Taylor was one of its authors. He always delivered to an exact length, well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger ...”

“... study to integrate a wealth of Thackeray illustration into its text, something that D.J. Taylor also does effectively. Taylor’s book represents a third generation of biography. His judgment on Thackeray is generous, but much less inclusive than Ray’s. The basis of Taylor’s ...”

“... It was fortunate for George Eliot, or Marian Evans as she was in 1852, that the philosopher Herbert Spencer rejected her brave and desperate pleas for him to marry her. If he had accepted, she might well have found herself in something akin to Sarah Austin’s position as emotional and financial prop to a miserable, selfish hypochondriac ...”

“... has supported. Only the question of its authorship was troublesome. The identity of ‘Jo: Taylor’ has been subjected to a needle-in-haystack search for a painter called John Taylor. Duncan-Jones, threading her way carefully back through the marginalia of the historian ...”

“... with culture, I reach for my revolver when offered philosophies of history,’ wrote A.J.P. Taylor some years ago, when the ‘What is History’ theme was going the rounds. He likes to parade himself as a simple, practical man – ‘an old-fashioned, penny-counting historian’. He thinks that history’s only function is ‘fun’, dismisses the rest ...”

“... 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 find myself applauding, though with some anxiety, the dispatch of a naval force to the South Atlantic. This leads me to ...”

“... not ruined by redevelopment, or having friends with a sense of humor? One great virtue of Charles Taylor’s discussion of our values is that it escapes the narrowness of what is conventionally thought to be moral, and looks much more broadly. Another notable advance is that he goes beyond merely stating intuitions, and both shows how they used to be ...”

“... of Hanover in the early 18th century has been extended by historians to encompass the reigns of George IV and William IV. Now Price wishes to stretch the elastic a little further and bring in the Victorians as well. He argues that neither the advent of Parliamentary democracy in 1832 nor the coming of free trade in 1846 saw off the dominant features of the ...”