“... by frantic diplomatic misunderstandings and miscalculations, not a million miles from A.J.P. Taylor’s thesis that inflexible railway schedules were to blame. In War by Timetable (1969), Taylor argued airily: ‘the Germans had no deliberate aim of subverting the liberties of Europe. No one had time for a deliberate ...”

“... I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up ...”

“... ghost story is here made over into what could almost be read as a few bars of the Four Quartets. Charles Williams’s ‘Et in sempiternum pereant’ relates: ‘The thing itself, a wasted flicker of pallid movement, danced and gyrated in white flame before him.’ This thing – the invention of a writer whom Eliot admired – has to do with a ...”

“... The 18 bits and bobs included a 1967 Superman metal lunchbox, an autographed photo of Elizabeth Taylor, a 1952 Silver Dawn Rolls Royce, on which the bidding stood at $38,500, and issue six of The Maxx, a comic book, on which the bidding had reached 75 cents: it was the cheapest item, and the earliest to be listed, at 17:44:27 PDT on 6 September 1995. There ...”

“... His more typical correspondents are his business agents in the Greek islands, his banker friend Charles Barry in Genoa, and the Greek Committee in London. The tone is, according to your taste, practical or already middle-aged. Perhaps, as Marchand suggests, the Greek leader Prince Mavrocordatos was flattering Byron and encouraging him to spend more of his ...”

“... was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is toasting the ...”

“... of the war, Joyce had ‘broadcast for the enemy’, and that was enough to finish him. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that he was hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a small fine. Widespread wireless ownership led to a wartime golden age of radio propaganda. The Nazis were quickest off the mark, but other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as a ...”

“... mainland triggered protests and uprisings across the imperial periphery as the historian Miles Taylor has shown. The transportation en masse of potential trouble-makers from England and Ireland triggered protests in Australia and the Cape Colony. To keep sugar cheap the British government abandoned the system of tariff walls known as ‘imperial ...”

“... one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is reported as ...”

“... In​ 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism:never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated ...”

“... now called the ‘Holy Circle’ the strikingly handsome Geoffrey Phibbs, later known as Geoffrey Taylor. After some months with Graves and Riding (who insisted on burning Phibbs’s clothes and confiscating his books as part of his induction into the circle) Phibbs and Graves’s wife decided they would rather be a more orthodox duo than part of the ...”

“... Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie 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 ...”

“... a marina fit for Abramovich and his cohorts. Or, more modestly, for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on their pleasure craft, the Kalizma. Sadly, that vision was premature. The proposed harbour for the Have-Yachts would have to wait. And move upstream.My somewhat distressed 1993 map had a magnificent but provisional set of dotted lines running down ...”