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“... its limiting framework. A case in point is a study that can be read as a pendant to Vogel’s, Jay Taylor’s biography of Chiang Kai-shek, The Generalissimo. In many ways, the starting points are close. Taylor too is a former official, a career diplomat in the intelligence apparatus of the State Department, with ...”

“... among the working populations of the industrial world. In 1909 the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the principle of ‘time and motion’ studies to analyse labour productivity. The British psychologist William McDougall and the young W.H.R. Rivers devised laboratory tests to measure fatigue, which correlated with reduced hours of sleep and ...”

“... Colette, Edith Head, Deborah Kerr, Leslie Caron, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Marni Nixon, Julie Andrews, Mia Farrow, Jeanne Moreau, Merle Oberon, Capucine and Cher. I could advance a lesbian interpretation of Audrey Hepburn’s oeuvre, though that is not my present aim: instead, I wish to inquire into reverberations between ...”

“... and ‘travels a good deal.’ In form, Doctor Criminale is an old-fashioned quest novel. Francis Jay, a young British journalist – trained in deconstruction and cultural politics at Sussex – is left high and dry when his paper (evidently the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent) folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself on ...”

“... whose script, though closer to what he was after, still didn’t satisfy him; and finally Samuel Taylor, recommended because he came from San Francisco, where Hitchcock had decided the film should be set. It was Taylor who proposed giving away the solution to the mystery halfway through the film. This spilling of beans ...”

“... less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did ...”

“... Most of its 27 biographies originated as book reviews and – in the tradition set by A.J.P. Taylor – they reappear without footnotes or full scholarly apparatus, though with a substantial ‘Select Bibliography’. The newcomer gets double value from a book of this kind, for it combines surveying the abundant recently-published material on ...”

“... what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she ...”

“... The term ‘Establishment’, in its secular modern sense, seems to have originated with A.J.P. Taylor in 1953. He stretched its provenance from the Established Church to cover the governing classes in general. What Henry Fairlie did two years later in a famous article in the Spectator was to gloss the term as identifying a particular sort of informal power ...”

“... associations with hard-worn crooks – ‘out hustling, same clothes for days’, in the words of Jay-Z – like Pepper, a ruthless but sensitive friend of his father. But he comes to realise that crookedness is his inheritance. ‘Carney had a bent to his personality, how could he not, growing up with a father like that. You had to know your limits as a man ...”

“... Blinder’s Princeton colleague Ben Bernanke, is one of the book’s heroes. Another is Jerome ‘Jay’ Powell, who was appointed Fed chair by Trump – the only thing Trump did that Blinder thinks was a good idea. Powell, he writes, ‘had greatness thrust upon him’, leading the central bank through the stormy waters of the pandemic with ...”

“... question underlies the instructions and acknowledgments that pass between members of the family of Jay Follet on the day after his death. Rufus, the son, wants to believe that his father was good, and he comes to believe it, over the murmur of voices with hints and rumours that he was a drinker and a fast driver and a poor breadwinner, and over the priest’s ...”

“... in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government ...”

“... with an eye to party politics, recruited able young socialists like Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. The diaries reveal the many points of conflict between the career Civil Service and the outsiders. There were quarrels about honours: were the temporaries entitled to them? And there were differences over policy. One of Dalton’s pet ideas at the Board of ...”

“... for insanity. But first he wanted to be rich. Warhol’s attitude to money was a cross between Jay Gatsby’s and Holly Golightly’s – he yearned for the world where money allowed you to be whoever you wanted to be, where money was confidence and confidence was character, and where each day was a promise of diamonds as big as the Ritz. Carmel Snow, who ...”