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“... hardly features at all in these write-ups of a series of nearly 80 taped conversations Taylor Branch had with Clinton over the course of his presidency. On the few occasions he does get noticed it is as a minor irritant and something of a buffoon. He gets only one sustained mention, in early 1996, when Bill and Hillary are griping about the ...”

“... electrified the black community – ‘his oratory had just made him for ever a public person,’ Taylor Branch has written in his monumental study, America in the King Years – and his official position soon made him Montgomery’s spokesman to the nation. Martin Luther King had found his voice. Yet the movement of which King had become the symbol was ...”

“... what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she ...”

“... campaign, in Texas, in 1972. Clinton was sent down to the Lone Star state, along with his friend Taylor Branch, at a moment when the Nixon forces seemed almost unstoppable. (A subsequent post-Watergate myth has depicted the press as anti-Nixon during this period. In point of fact, the general refusal of the media to discuss Nixon’s illegal use of ...”

“... can to the people who look after their children and clean their houses. One of the reasons Barbara Taylor thinks Mary Wollstonecraft rewards our attention two hundred years after her death is that Wollstonecraft’s fervid opposition to sexism was based on a ‘root and branch’ egalitarianism not easily compromised by ...”

“... shed as a possible arms store by planting in it two old rifles, without ammunition. The Special Branch of the RUC organised the assassinations of the five men – three of them were gunned down in one car, the other two in another. Two young men, one of whom had no connection whatever with the IRA or the Republican movement, were then shot in the shed. One ...”

“... extremity. At least now our guess can be an educated one.In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of Taylor Branch’s biography of Martin Luther King, we learn more about the extreme domestic cowardice that was the domestic counterpart to the Kennedys’ overseas imperial bluster. After the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the death of ...”

“... A cynic? How can I not be when I have spent my life writing history?’ Alan Taylor’s love letters to his Hungarian third wife created a predictably prurient, though transient, stir when they were published earlier this year. Their more lasting interest may lie in the light that they throw upon Taylor the practising historian, musing to a fellow historian about the mysteries of his craft ...”

“... it was, as Leahy puts it, ‘blind in intelligence terms’, having to rely on the RUC Special Branch. And the RUC, not welcome in working-class nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry, was starved of intelligence-gathering opportunities. MI5 – preoccupied with ‘subversion’ from ‘domestic enemies’, and targeting such groups as the National Council ...”

“... Many tributes have been paid to Alan Taylor, including some by old and close friends who knew him very much better than I did. My excuse for adding one more piece is that I would like to explain something of what he meant to younger historians who came within his orbit. Perhaps I shall end up speaking only for myself, but at any rate I can speak from experience as one of his pupils ...”

“... This is the third full biography of A.J.P. Taylor to appear since his death in 1990. I find this fact almost more interesting than anything in the biographies themselves. For more than two decades after the war Taylor was, very nearly, the public face of the historical profession in Britain, delivering his pugnacious, often revisionist, views on television and radio, in more than two dozen books and hundreds of newspaper columns, and in countless lectures to Oxford undergraduates and the history-minded public ...”

“... only cursorily, and had in fact had much of the ground cut away from under them by the Special Branch’s removal of officers and evidence from the scene. The Special Branch clearly ruled the roost, and was persistently obstructive of the enquiry. Finally, when it was established that a tape had been made of one of the ...”

“... and the worst not cautious enough. ‘Victorian studies’ has been colonised by an over-populated branch of English literature in which the same canonical texts are read and reread in order to decode Victorian values. Intellectual historians continue for the most part to give the era a wide berth. Social historians reared on class have switched to gender and ...”

“... his post on 27 September. ‘Counting on you to be right about this interview, Gordon,’ William Taylor, the chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Kiev, texted Sondland on 9 September at 12.34 a.m. Three minutes later Sondland replied: ‘Bill, I never said I was “right”. I said we are where we are and believe we have identified the best pathway ...”

“... coup which will pave the way for the Second Empire. From there, we watch as the cruel, legitimate branch of the family, the Rougons, amass power and influence first in their rural foothold and later in Paris. Then we have the novels of the middle-class collateral branch, the Mourets, whom we follow from the country into ...”