“... Cleopatra movies from the early 20th century to Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 ‘Lizpatra’, as the Taylor/Burton epic was nicknamed. The first essay makes it clear why Chauveau’s attempt to ‘exorcise the myth’ of Cleopatra and concentrate only on the ‘facts’ was doomed to be so short. Very little evidence survives from her native Egypt. A few ...”

“... going to have to put up with it. The third of Hogarth’s ‘undertakers’, John ‘Chevalier’ Taylor (1703-72), seems to have been an evident crook, who boasted of his success at seducing patients, talked what he called the ‘true Ciceronian’ (i.e. always ending every period with a verb), may have been the death of Bach and certainly did nothing for ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... hardly features at all in these write-ups of a series of nearly 80 taped conversations Taylor Branch had with Clinton over the course of his presidency. On the few occasions he does get noticed it is as a minor irritant and something of a buffoon. He gets only one sustained mention, in early 1996, when Bill and Hillary are griping about the torrent ...”

“... already been printed elsewhere, but a number of them appear here for the first time. Professor David Dilks has provided, in his introduction to each volume, a lucid and dispassionate account of the main lines of development of British foreign policy, and a framework into which the individual essays can be fitted. Nearly all these detailed studies ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... Even many who defended it expected it to disappear within a generation. But it didn’t. A.J.P. Taylor once remarked that 1848 was the moment when German history reached its turning-point, and failed to turn. This is more false than true, but it fits the history of the death penalty – up to a point. Capital punishment was restored across most of Germany ...”

“... III. Namier was accused by some fellow historians – among them his one-time protégé A.J.P. Taylor – of taking the mind out of history: trampling on ideas, principles and beliefs until they were indistinguishable from crude self-interest. Yet Namier was, arguably, the 20th century’s most original historian. His work on England in the third quarter ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... version of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Clift lets the women take centre-stage; it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s film, then Katharine Hepburn’s. Here, as in Freud, he’s a ‘listener’. Of all the early films, it’s in the last, Vittorio De Sica’s excellent (though butchered) Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) that Clift takes the greatest ...”

“... Dean try to create the edgy Jett Rink by keeping his bladder full for a scene with Elizabeth Taylor, and then, after blowing his lines, dealing with his awe of Taylor by emptying his bladder in full sight of her, the crew and several thousand movie-struck onlookers. (A good moment to recall Laurence Olivier’s comment ...”

“... call-to-arms for all makers of literary lives, and Adam Sisman, previously a biographer of A.J.P. Taylor, has taken on a genuine task, a presumptuous task indeed, to write a biography of the biography, in the hope of casting light on the very real subject of how to make a biographical subject real. His book is successful in ways that might draw attention to ...”

“... throughout – the cameraman is Pawel Edelman, who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist, as well as Taylor Hackford’s glossy biography of Ray Charles. This is important, because the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels ...”

“... art collection and the building interact wonderfully well. Three giant bronze beetles, by Wendy Taylor, huddle at the bottom of a spiral staircase, encouraging you to look down at them and take in the perfect curve of the concrete at the same time. A Barbara Hepworth sculpture – Ascending Form (Gloria), on loan from the Hepworth Estate, a circle in an ...”

“... considered an ‘imposing’ villa on the outskirts of the city. Waspishly, the historian A.J.P. Taylor described it as ‘like Asa himself, small, squat and full of Victorian bric-à-brac’. Of the four recent British giants of broad-gauge history, Adam Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and ...”