“... At my high school, Daphne du Maurier was on the English department reading list, along with Taylor Caldwell and all those other books by Twain. I read Sydney Sheldon’s first five novels, Judith Krantz’s first three; until I went to college, I believed that Watership Down was the best book I’d ever read – and I was right. What attracted me ...”

“... could find no place for it, and in the book as it stands, they have had to employ italics to mark the status of several flashbacks. Some of these sections – the relentless teasing of Rufus by a pack of older boys; a visit by the family to back-country relatives – go on too long and hardly fit the narrative. Reading this work of memory and ...”

“... More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s graceful mirror at the end of the ...”

“... in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got the right ...”

“... slimeRise and deride this sepulchre of crime.When war is claimed as a mother of invention (A.J.P. Taylor, Paul Virilio), that invention is hardly intended to signify the memorials that constitute a quintessential building type of the 1920s, albeit not much of one. Although medals were fashioned of different metals according to the status of the award, men ...”

“... that they are ‘ordinary virtues’, and that their opposites are ‘ordinary vices’. Charles Taylor, whom Gordon cites, lists five features of these ‘ordinary virtues’: they are rooted in dispositions accessible to anyone; they begin at home, in daily life; they subsist in the interaction of each of us with our fellow human beings at the first level ...”

“... on me, for marriage. You see, marriage for Melodia was what it must have been for Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Hutton, no big thing; and in Melodia’s case, a natural consequence of sodomy and prayer. Mother sat between Melodia and me, with Father across the table, scowling at the prices on the dinner menu. I know what he was thinking: how can they get ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ A.J.P. Taylor said that Channon’s ‘rank highest among the political diaries of the period: written, as all good diaries should be, by a man not ashamed to own his weaknesses, it recaptures perfectly the atmosphere of the 1930s.’ Reading the two diaries long ago, I ...”

“... thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the posthumously published Anima Poetae, argued that ‘it’ was the right pronoun for referring to indefinite nouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘the person’, ‘in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either ...”

“... Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular music, created by the descendants of slaves, had evolved into the country’s greatest art form. ‘It was a ...”

“... on the dominance of the big seven private housebuilding companies – in descending order of size, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Homes, Persimmon, Bellway, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson – who between them have almost 40 per cent of the market in new homes. But the most striking thing in the document is a chart displaying the history of Britain, in housebuilding ...”

“... of Harvard. The American connection can be sensed in Crusoe, and it is wittily glanced at by Mark Twain as he rewrites the novel with a tender and mischievous irony (Huck’s account of the contents of the catfish’s stomach – a brass button, a round ball ‘and lots of rubbage’ – is pure Defoe). At Morton’s Academy, students were taught science ...”

“... Keats had written: ‘I am in such a situation that were it not for the assistance of Brown & Taylor [his publisher], I must be as badly off as a man can be.’ George would not take the hint. When he left again for America he did so with far more money than Keats believed he had a right to. Keats may have been wrong in his accounting; the situation was ...”

“... where was he going to live? – in the context of a housing shortage so dire that Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, has reported instances of prisoners being issued with tents and sleeping bags on release. After getting out, Grimshaw lived in a supervised hostel for eight weeks, then moved into the two-bedroom house where I met ...”