“... mother-nature’. Even Emerson melted, warmly recommending the poems to his friend the critic Charles Eliot Norton, who thought that in some ‘preposterous yet fascinating’ way they fused ‘Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism’. At the same time, he missed the point, gravely assuring James Russell Lowell that ‘one cannot leave the book ...”

“... to protect him. The former are mainly men, the latter almost exclusively women.’ Among the men, Charles McGrath, who was Singer’s editor at the New Yorker, told Richard Bernstein that ‘the public Singer was a creation. He pretended not to be interested in his fame, but he was consumed by success, literary stature and his popularity long past the age ...”

“... Barnard is right to emphasise just how important the market for poetry was, which was why Taylor and Hessey, the young firm which took over Keats’s Poems of 1817 from Charles Ollier, were prepared to treat him so generously. They did the same for Clare. In the event, neither poet made it commercially: in Keats’s ...”

“... his punch-card loom in 1804, which, thirty more years down the road of modernisation, inspired Charles Babbage in his Analytical Engine, the great predecessor of the contemporary computer. For the dying man, the player piano is a lost term between these last two machines, the vanishing mediator between industrial and digital ages: ‘the beginning of ...”

“... In the centre of the room there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form ...”

“... beheaded ‘for the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the restoring of monarchy.’ This remark functions mainly as an alibi for his loyalty to the post-Protectorate political structure, and is intended to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like ...”

“... book is high. Hellman is not the only snotty famous person to fall under her jaded eye. James Taylor and Carly Simon, Hellman’s guests one sunny afternoon, ‘smile stiffly’ at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the ...”

“... of England. It ‘replaces’ the volume by Collingwood, which, together with those by Stenton, Taylor and perhaps Watson, was among the successes of a not entirely happy series. He can thus afford the luxury of a leisured and expansive approach that is rarely granted nowadays to the authors of standard histories. His book is in fact twice as long as ...”

“... Jack and a lurid, green-tinged backdrop of clouds and bright skies, Heartland’s president, James Taylor, declared climate change ‘a Trojan horse for socialism and communism’. Lois Perry, who runs Heartland’s UK operation, went further. Carbon dioxide, she claimed, is ‘not a pollutant’. Electric cars exist so that ‘this neo-Marxist, communist ...”

“... an actor explore a part and bring greater depth and resonance to it. Trimble and his deputy, John Taylor, are redefining Unionism, and the redefinition is there in the News Letter editorial’s ‘new-sprung modern light’, as Edmund Burke would put it. Something is flying off and out of the caked nest, and it’s not crying ‘yarr yarr yarr’. The comfort ...”

“... callous and even (through its agents) brutal. Take Moorehead’s approach to A.J.P Taylor’s breathtakingly naive rhetorical question at a CND meeting in 1958: ‘ “Is there anyone here who would do this to another human being?” Silence. “Then why are we making the damned thing?” Thunderous applause.’ Whatever happened at the ...”

“... minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the first ballot of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest ...”

“... so much more brazen, upfront way it puts this on display. One of my favourite moments was Barbara Taylor Bradford renewing her marriage vows in the total privacy of a completely deserted tropical island on which no tourists step; with only black luggage carriers in attendance , as well as the whole photographic and editorial team of Hello!. (She said this day ...”

“... the late summer of 1984, dissidents began to appear in Yorkshire itself: Ken Foulstone and Robert Taylor, miners at Manton colliery, petitioned to be allowed to return to work and had the strike declared unlawful, both in Yorkshire and nationally. These men and others like them were helped by a network of ‘advisers’, shadowy at first but increasingly ...”