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“... to be found, for example, in the brilliant work of Norman Davies’s own tutor at Oxford, A.J.P. Taylor, or give the reader the same tiresome sense that he is being got at in ways he cannot contest. Instead, the record of two millennia and more is bound together by an important and forgotten thesis. Celtic history, together with the sometimes over-copious ...”

“... occupies. Merely irritating is the authors’ repeated citation of the pronouncements of Mr A.J.P. Taylor – not so much, one fears, because they regard the historian as infallible (which he nearly is), but because they hope to keep on the sunniest side of the kindly critic. During the First World War there had been a divide between what were, as ...”

“... year that his total earnings from Spotify up to that point came to more than $80 million. Even Taylor Swift, once Spotify’s most high-profile critic, has made her peace with it. Swift removed her music from the platform in 2014 – ‘Valuable things should be paid for,’ she said – but relented in 2017. By last year, Spotify had paid her an estimated ...”

“... plot. A writer telling it according to the calendar, in Hynes’s manner, must desperately envy Simon Schama, in his Citizens, where irreversible changes in the national consciousness seem to be happening almost every other week. There are of course other plot-elements in Hynes’s narrative, less directly measured by the calendar: for instance, a story ...”

“... literary support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all good, but it had come too late. In 1968 Bill Blake died and Stead was ...”

“... of all kinds. One by-product of their operations was scientific discovery. As the historian Simon Mills has shown, the chaplains sent by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the Levant Company’s factories in the Eastern Mediterranean returned with books for Bodley’s Library and a mummy for the Ashmolean. Edward Pococke brought back not only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so-called Chandos portrait as an image of Shakespeare painted by a friend and fellow actor, John Taylor. Donated to the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, the Chandos is the only candidate to have been granted much credence, but new ones continue to surface, most recently the Cobbe Portrait, which formed the centrepiece of the evocatively titled Shakespeare ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a kind of courage of which I would have been incapable.19 May. I’m reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage’s latest collection of poems. They always ring bells, though, like Larkin, he’ll often take off at the end of a poem when I don’t always follow. There’s a lovely funny poem in this collection, ‘Poundland’, which is enviably ...”

“... of The Prince was ‘shrewd’ if ‘immoral’. In Britain, the influential 1602 translation by Simon Patrick of Innocent Gentillet’s treatise Anti-Machiavel managed to disseminate Machiavelli’s ideas, sometimes in garbled form, as it rebutted them. Gentillet notes with satisfaction that although he doesn’t know if the Medici (to one of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The same list in 1987 saw knighthoods bestowed on Frank Gibb (chairman and chief executive of Taylor Woodrow which had given £35,000 to the Party in the previous financial year) and Derek Alun-Jones (a director of Royal Insurance, which had also given £35,000 the previous year). At the height of the Tory leadership crisis in November 1990, a group of ...”

“... when it came to the primary political battle of her life, which was to defeat socialism. When Simon Jenkins, then the editor of the Times, went to interview Thatcher at Chequers in the run-up to the leadership contest, he saw a copy of Heseltine’s latest book on the coffee table, stuffed with post-it notes. She told him she had been marking up what she ...”