“... would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this space. But this attitude did not prevail; Taylor, who popularised the watchword "Down with dawdling!", carried the day.’ The flâneur views history subversively; he – and it is usually he – deliberately relocates its meanings, its hierarchies. As far back as 1929, Benjamin had explained why the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant references ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”

“... our wants change. In an implicit critique of, among other things, American pragmatism, Charles Taylor, in The Ethics of Authenticity, defines his notion of a moral ideal: ‘I mean a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be where “better” and “higher” are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard ...”

“... On 15 June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, prodigious, garrulous and chubby, his brilliant undergraduate career in tatters, set out from Cambridge in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale ...”

“... The unions’ hold over the British workplace from the 1940s to the 1970s, the historian Robert Taylor concluded in 1994, was ‘always more illusory and less substantial than their many enemies liked to suggest’. The same goes for union militancy in general. The graph of working days lost annually in Britain to strikes and other labour disputes is flat ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”