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“... think 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 ...”

“... growing weakness of the British economy in the 20th century reduced the demand for their services. Russell Taylor forcibly makes the same point. Professor Rubinstein’s argument is nearly always serious and absorbing and based on detailed and original research, but occasionally he falls well below his usual level. Thus, in an attempt to show that good ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... drinking. When the book opens she is compulsively monitoring a Facebook post by a woman called Taylor Birch, who has revived an accusation of sexual assault against a former high school teacher. Taylor first made her allegation more than a decade earlier, when she was 14, but this time people are listening. The accused ...”

“... The bookseller was a snob about snobbery and thought it was vulgar to talk about class. D.J. Taylor is perhaps a literary snob for Cooper gets no mention in his much less enjoyable The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery (Little, Brown, £16.99). His first mistake is to attempt a definition rather than rely on examples. He suggests ...”

“... of him or married – the last hard for him to bear. An earlier biographer of Forrest Reid – 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’, ...”

“... a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful books produced by representatives of ‘the human potential movement’) nor knock ...”

“... Do novelists come nicer than Elizabeth Taylor? Her mother died of politeness – she developed appendicitis over Christmas, and didn’t want to interrupt the doctor’s holiday – but rather than renounce good manners on the spot, her biographer Nicola Beauman writes, Taylor ‘cared about good manners very much indeed’ to the end of her days ...”

“... imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur ...”

“... Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 162 Years after his Lordship’s Death), and by Ken Russell, who has tried to make them palpable in his latest film, Gothic. If one considers the current general concern with the Aids virus in conjunction with these detailed studies, both scholarly and popularising, of the lives of the so-called Satanic School on ...”

“... the pretence of objectivity and the pleasure of narrative to a few hundred pages of critical fiat. Russell Fraser’s Shakespeare: The Later Years contains 88 pages of notes (the text itself is only 280 pages); but the overwhelming majority are simply line-references to phrases culled from Shakespeare’s plays and poems, verbal glitter with which Fraser ...”

“... rather casually: 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 ...”

“... by masculine greed and individualism. Feminine ‘affections’, the Scottish philosophe William Russell wrote in 1773, ‘are in the commerce of the world what current money is in trade: they are sometimes not absolutely necessary, but one can never safely be without them … The women correct that rudeness which pride and passion introduce into the company ...”

“... Waterloo generation, as the opponents of Chartism all were – Napier and Wellington on horseback, Russell and Peel on the front bench – had seen how loyalism triumphed over revolution on a previous occasion. For the most part they slept more easily in 1848 than many historians of radicalism have suggested. What troubled many observers in the 1840s was that ...”

“... for the secular and liberal causes of their day. John Stuart Mill was one such, and Bertrand Russell another. In our own time, the latest and perhaps the last of this chain of great figures has been Sir Alfred Ayer. Ayer shares with Russell and with Mill not only an intellectual allegiance to empiricist doctrine, and a ...”