“... for a coaching job were Vince Lombardi, most famous of American football coaches, Nelson and David Rockefeller (Bollettieri had been ‘the family pro’) and Maxwell Taylor, Chief of Staff of the US Army. What doesn’t much matter to Bollettieri is education, but then education doesn’t much matter to tennis. Becker ...”

“... ministers scurried into the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic ...”

“... who first tried to assassinate a unionist politician, shooting the hardline Stormont minister John Taylor six times yet failing to kill him. All this meant the Officials could compete with the Provos for support in Derry and West Belfast, but it didn’t sit well with the nominal goal of the movement, which was the reform of the Northern Irish state, not its ...”

“... in public as she was willing to go in private. In 1992, in a letter to the Eurosceptic MP Teddy Taylor, she wrote:I would personally think it is terribly important that those who have been very doubtful about the European enterprise should have some kind of alternative strategy clearly set out … I have always felt that the best answer for us was to be a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t ...”

“... his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first half of ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... vivid feel for characterisation, that of adolescents in particular, as if the first part of David Copperfield were being written today in exotic places. Paradise concludes in a fashionable aporia – its author is after all an academic – but both novels seem successfully to resist the anxieties of contemporary influence, and to behave, as it were, in ...”

“... learned journals were concerned. But help was unexpectedly at hand. I was asked by the late Basil Taylor to give some talks at the RCA, and somebody must have liked them, for I was soon on the Third Programme, which, as I daresay few remember, did a lot of book reviewing in 20-minute slots, as well as unscripted conversations about new novels and the like. I ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... the emergency has landed the narrator not only in hospital but within the domestic contours of a David Sedaris essay. In the new novel, one of the only references to that earlier life is the mention of a syphilis infection contracted in Eastern Europe; the doctors investigate this as one possible cause of the aortic dissection, before ruling it out. Even ...”

“... David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field ...”

“... talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”