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“... there is anything left to say. ‘Alan Taylor has been the subject of two good biographies,’ Chris Wrigley writes in his preface. ‘Perhaps, in the centenary year of his birth, there is room for a third.’ Perhaps. But whatever commemorations and retrospectives 2006 brought, the rediscovery of Taylor was not among them. His scholarly reputation ...”

“... followed in 1976 and a third in 1986. A stupendous bibliography of his writings, compiled by Chris Wrigley, was perhaps the most fitting tribute of all. By the end of his life, his reputation among modern historians was probably higher than ever. There was also a curious intellectual current in his favour. Narrative history, so long regarded with ...”

“... not instruction’. The fact is that he has himself given the world a great deal of both. As Chris Wrigley’s large and thorough bibliography of his works shows, he has been more prolific, on a wider range of subjects, than any of his contemporaries except perhaps for E.H. Carr. He has written two standard works of reference in Oxford ...”

“... Writing history is like W.C. Fields juggling,’ was how he put it. ‘It looks easy until you try to do it.’ In 1977, when this comment was first published, some younger readers may have asked themselves: W.C. Who? Typically, this was not a forced, would-be trendy allusion to current vogues of popular culture in the electronic media but an authentically personal image, implicitly framed in nostalgia ...”