Who do you regard as the greatest living historian?

Although Alan [A.J.P. Taylor] was by the 1970s a fairly marginal member of the College, he would always make a point of attending the viva examinations of all the History candidates, asking them in turn the single question, 'Who do you regard as the greatest living historian?' There was never much doubt what Alan's own answer to this question was.

R.W. Johnson, 'Reflections on Magdalen's golden age' Magdalen College Record 2015, 123

Nothing is said about killing off nine-tenths of the population, which would have to be the first step

I am for scrupulously preserving the most enchanting bits of it [Old England], such as the cathedrals and the colleges and the Cotswolds, and for letting the rest take its chance. There are people who believe that in some mysterious way we can all return to this Old England; though nothing is said about killing off nine-tenths of the population, which would have to be the first step. ... They [the industrial workers] all rushed into the towns and mills as soon as they could, as we know, which suggests that the dear old quaint England they were escaping from could not have been very satisfying. You do not rush our of Arcadia to work in a factory twelve hours a day for about eighteen-pence. Moreover, why did the population increase so rapidly after the industrial revolution? What was it about Merrie England that kept the numbers down?

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 372-4

There's a long section, of which this is part, about the three Englands Priestley discerns - Old, Industrial, and modern. He's excellent on them all, and I think a very well done archetype of the impetus that gave us the post-war settlement.

If you want to know the difference between working for the glory of God and working for the benefit of debenture-holders, simply take a journey and keep your eyes open

You go up and down this country and what makes you jump with astonishment and delight is something that has been there for at least five hundred years. And it is not its age but its mere presence that does the trick. If you want to know the difference between working for the glory of God and working for the benefit of debenture-holders, simply take a journey and keep your eyes open.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 330

After you have seen it, you realise that it is not for likes of us to be sorry for ourselves

I did explore the Tyneside, and have not been genuinely sorry for myself since; though at times I have caught myself at the old drooping tricks and have been ashamed. There is, you see, something bracing about the Tyne. After you have seen it, you realise that it is not for likes of us to be sorry for ourselves.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 275

Note here,  Priestley is lamenting the grinding poverty of the communities around Newscastle, not saying it is intrinsically dreadful. He is ruder about Lancashire, whose ugliness he describes as 'exhilarating'

It is absurd to be merely gentlemanly about it, like the Church of England, or drab and respectable, like the Nonconformists

I stayed there a few minutes [listening to the Salvation Army band], and came to the conclusion that if I could persuade myself to believe in the Christian account of this life - and the essence of it, the self-sacrifice of a god for men, seems to good to be true, and the rest of it, the theological jugglery lit by hell-fire, not worth having - I should either join the Catholic church or fall in with the Salvation Army. Both have the right religious attitude; that is, they are not afraid of being thought noisy and vulgar; to take the thing out into the street. After all, if you really believe that the gates of heaven are swinging open above you and the pit of Hell yawning below, it is absurd to be merely gentlemanly about it, like the Church of England, or drab and respectable, like the Nonconformists.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 172

Behind all these new movements of this age ... [has been] the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger

Bradford is really more provincial now than it was twenty years ago. But so, I suspect, is the whole world. It must be when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all these new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 155-6

This whole section on Bradford's German-Jewish community, of which this is the climax, is extraordinarily good

Port drinkers appreciate the tepid warmth of the fading aristocracy

Port should be sipped and not drunk. This is partly because of its velvet body, and partly by way of parsimonious affectation. Let others abandon themselves to the bitter triumphs of whisky on the rocks or dry martini. Port drinkers appreciate the tepid warmth of the fading aristocracy, the taste of fruit from the curate's garden and the old-fashioned sickliness of a recipe that brings a delicate blush to a young lady's cheeks.

P. Delerm, The small pleasures of life (1997), 9-10

Great painting was maximum action and maximum atmospherics on a maximum scale

He sat back on one of the chairs and gazed at this huge helping of art [The Crucifixion, Tintoretto, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. 1565]. It really was a mad painting, great if your idea of great painting was maximum action and maximum atmospherics on a maximum scale, which, at that moment, seemed a pretty good definition of maximum greatness. This was high concept art, all right, and there was no doubting who was the star of the show, the focus of everyone's attention. Everybody in the painting he was looking at was looking at the crucified Christ, even the two thieves who were getting crucified alongside him, even people like the guy on the horse, who was looking at something else.

G. Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009), 155-56

It is also one of my favourite paintings.

Any decent provincial newspaper ought to be able to give its readers a much saner picture of the world than the popular national papers

It is good that there should be a real independent provincial Press. People ought to read national newspapers, but they also ought to read local newspapers too, for England, even now, is still the country of local government , local politics, strong local interests, and only the newspaper written and published in the immediate neighbourhood can deal adequately with such government, politics and interests. It is important that people should read that Alderman Smith said this and Councillor Robinson did that. It is important that they should realize what is happening in their own district. Gossip and chatter from Fleet Street in a poor substitute for such information about and criticism of local affairs. Any decent provincial newspaper ought to be able to give its readers a much saner picture of the world than the popular national papers, with their hysteria and stunts and comic antics. 

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 36

Sadly, much of this is no longer true.

You have to enjoy the statistics

You have to enjoy the statistics. Every time a man steps up to bat, there's a [sic] historical dimension  ... It's the history of the game. Not quick but deep. You have time to bring history to bear.

P. Rose, A year of reading Proust (1999), 95

Disappointingly, this is about baseball, but it should apply to cricket.

From 2008.

His hatred of snobs derived from his snobbishness

His hatred of snobs derived from his snobbishness, but made the simple - minded (in other words, everyone) believe he was immune from snobbishness

M. Proust, The Guermantes Way (1920/21), 583

N.B. I've found my old book. This from 2008

These new motor coaches ... are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality

I doubt if even the most expensive private motors—those gigantic, three-thousand-pound machines—are as determinedly and ruthlessly comfortable as these new motor coaches. They are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality. This is how the ancient Persian monarchs would have travelled, had they known the trick of it. If I favoured violent revolution, the sudden overthrowing and destruction of a sneering favoured class, I should be bitterly opposed to the wide use of these vehicles. They offer luxury to all but the most poverty-stricken. They have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor traveller. No longer can the wealthy go splashing past in their private conveyances, driving the humble pedestrian against the wall, leaving him to shake his fist and curse the proud pampered crew.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 9

Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs

He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage Groby had it been his job. Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs...They had not used to; now no doubt they did. It was a Russian sort of trick. He had heard that even before the revolution great Russian nobles would disperse their estates, give their serfs their liberty, put on a hair shirt and sit by the roadside begging...Something like that. Perhaps Christopher was a symptom that the English were changing. He himself was not. He was just lazy and determined—and done with it!

F.M. Ford, The last post (1928) [Parade's End], 803

You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her

The beastly Huns! They stood between him and Valentine Wannop. If they would go home he could be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. You can't finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing-rooms. You mayn't be in the mood when she is in the mood--for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. You have to wait together--for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained...and exhausted. 

F.M. Ford, A man could stand up (1926) [Parade's End], 680

For I hold no man ought to refuse an honour in times like these ... because it is like slapping the sovereign in the face

'...But as it is I propose to refuse it and ask for a knighthood, if it won't too sicken you to have me a Sir...For I hold no man ought to refuse an honour in times like these, as has been done by certain sickening intellectuals, because it is like slapping the sovereign in the face and bound to hearten the other side, which no doubt was what was meant by those fellows.'

F.M. Ford, No more parades (1925) [Parade's End], 456

the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval good humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak: Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants: the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game: the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. 

... 

It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game...Like baseball or Association football...And heaven?...Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chautauqua, wherever that was...And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views.

F.M. Ford, No more parades (1925) [Parade's End], 394

That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left.

And over their port they agreed on two fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left.

F.M. Ford, Some do not...(1924)  [Parade's End], 84

As a political matter, is home cooking today a reactionary or progressive way to spend one's time?

Is cooking a form of oppression, as many feminists argued (with some justification, I might add) in the 1960s? Back in the 1970s, KFC ran billboards depicting a family-sized bucket of fried chicken under the slogan "Women's Liberation." And so perhaps it was, and still is for many women even now... As a political matter, is home cooking today a reactionary or progressive way to spend one's time?

M. Pollan, Cooked (2013),131-2

The way I do it, it is definitely reactionary.

Given the choice, many animals will opt for cooked food over raw

Given the choice, many animals will opt for cooked food over raw. This shouldn't surprise us: "coked food is better than raw," Wragham says, "because life is mostly concerned with energy" - and cooked food yields more energy. 

...

Ninety percent of a cooked egg is digested,whereas only 65 percent of a raw egg is; by the same token, the rarer the steak, or the more al dente the pasta, the less of it will be absorbed. Dieters take note.

M. Pollan, Cooked (2013), 61 (and footnote)

I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. you can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten.

M. Robinson, Gilead (2004), 237

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets

I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one to shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.  

M. Robinson, Gilead (2004), 65

Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody

Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant. But he is marvelous on the subject of joy, an also on its religious expressions.

Broughton takes a very dim view of him, because he unsettled the faith of so many people, but I take issue as much with those people as with Feuerbach. It seems to me people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled.

M. Robinson, Gilead (2004), 27

The greatest volume of any single product traded internationally in western Europe during the medieval period.

In the period 1305-36, when the city [Bordeaux] was prosperous under English occupation, it is estimated that wine exports from Gascony to England and Flanders reached 750,000 hectolitres a year. This represents the greatest volume of any single product traded internationally in western Europe during the medieval period.

B. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean (2001), 51

Hernando Cortez cannot be true

I wrote my Mexico book out of incredulity. Hernando Cortez cannot be true. There cannot have been a human being so brave, charismatic, obstinate and apparently indestructible. How could anyone be so greedy, fanatical, and unimaginative as to lead a few hundred men into an alien continent of whose topography he was ignorant, swarming with a race devoted to the slaughter and sacrifice of strangers, in order to take prisoner their their leader in his own capital city? And succeed. And then, when the tables are turned and he is driven out, set to and build thirteen vessels of war and carry them back one hundred and forty miles across mountains because the only way you can tackle a city sited in the middle of a lake is with superior shipping.And succeed again. Is a man who is impelled to do such things a hero or a maniac?

P.Lively, Moon tiger (1987)

War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It's had a disgracefully good press.

'Are we going to win the war?' asks Claudia.

'Yes. I assume so. Not because of the lord's intervention or because justice will prevail but because in the last resort we have greater resources. Wars have little to do with justice.Or valour or sacrifice or the other things traditionally associated with them. That's one thing I hadn't quite realised. War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It's had a disgracefully good press. I hope you and your friends are doing something to put that right.' 

P. Lively, Moon Tiger (1987), 102-3

More like a war fought at sea than on land

He had been up at the front and he'd be going back there next week. Or wherever the front by then was - that indeterminate confusion of minefields and dispositions of vehicles in the empty neutral sand. He once described it to me as more like a war fought at sea than on land, a sequence of advances and retreats in which the participants related only to each other and barely at all to the landscape across which they moved. A war in which there was nothing to get in the way  - no towns, no villages, no people - and nothing tangible to  gain or lose.

P. Lively, Moon Tiger (1987), 72-73

That war [WW2] seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice.

Yates's stories and novels return repeatedly to the weakness and hysterical anxiety of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity. His fiction, begun in the early 1950s, and written throughout the next four decades, was closely shadowed by the Second Word War. For Yates. that war seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice. If you fought in it, you never fought bravely enough (Yates was anxious about the bravery of his own conduct in the Seventy-Fifth Division, in Europe); if you missed it, the rest of your life would be perforated with inadequacies.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 201

The novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people

There are large contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical sceptic is also the great sermonising bully, not only telling us what we must think, but clearly writing a form of history … Second the novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people. Thirdly, theologically speaking War and Peace, for all its radical unconventionality, looks more and more like that characteristically vague growl of nineteenth-century doubt, in which God is no longer describable but impossible to abandon.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 152

And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?

'And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?'

'Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope around her neck and he's got hold of two pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all it was an accident. He didn't know the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper... And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was to stop being married. The stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everyone had to die of a virus - all that was just nonsense just made up by a  lot of poor stupid people who din't know any better.'

A. Huxley, Island (1962), 253

Pedantry and non-pedantry are indications only of temperament, not of culinary skill

And while we're about it: pedantry and non-pedantry are indications only of temperament, not of culinary skill. Non-pedants frequently misunderstand pedants and are inclined to adopt an air of superiority. 'Oh, I don't follow recipes,' they will say, as if cooking from a text were like making love with a sex-manual open at your elbow. Or: 'I read recipes, but only to get ideas.' Well, fine, but let me ask you this: would you use a lawyer who said 'Oh, I glance at a few statutes, but only to get ideas'? One of the best cooks I know automatically gets down a recipe book whenever she roasts a chicken.

J. Barnes, The pedant in the kitchen (2003), 14

The only product of the forces of evolution capable of understandingits own origins

He remembered a time at Bart's, holding a human brain in his hands for the first time, being amazed by the weight of it. This blown eggshell had contained the only product of the forces of evolution capable of understanding its own origins.

P. Barker, The ghost road (1995), 238

Cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so farencountered much to be cynical about

Potts  had been a science student at Manchester University, bright, articulate, cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so far encountered much to be cynical about. The war, he insisted loudly, flushed with wine, was feathering the nests of profiteers. It was being fought to safeguard access to the oil wells of Mesopotamia. It had nothing, absoluely nothing, to do with Belgian neutrality, the rights of small nations or anything like that. And if Hallet thought it had, then Hallet was a naive idiot. Hallet came from an old army family and had been well and expensively educated to think as little as possible; confronted by Potts, he floundered, but then quickly began to formulate beliefs he had hitherto believed everybody shared.

P. Barker, The ghost road (1995), 143

They eat nothing but offal cooked in rancid olive oil in Turkey

Bond sat down in a comfortable-armed chair and took the small tumbler the waiter offered him. He lifted it towards Kerim and tasted it. It [raki] was identical with ouzo. He drank it down. At once the waiter refilled his glass.

"And now to order your lunch. They eat nothing but offal cooked in rancid olive oil in Turkey. At least the offal in Misir Carsasi is the best."

I. Fleming, From Russia, with love (1957), 109

A great deal of killing has to be done in the USSR

A great deal of killing has to be done in the USSR, not because the average Russian is a cruel man, though some of their races are among the cruellest peoples in the world, but as an instrument of policy. People who act against the State are enemies of the State, and the State has no room for enemies. There is too much to do for precious time to be allocated to them, and, if they are a persistent nuisance, they get killed. In a country with a population of 200,000,000, you can kill many thousands a year without missing them. ... The problem is the shortage of executioners.

I. Fleming, From Russia, with love (1957), 23

The only discourtesies I have met with have been from Prussians

The only discourtesies I have met with have been from Prussians. The Bavarians I know have all been delightful, and as for the Tyrolese, I cannot say how much I like them. But the Prussuans see to be filled with a hatred as bitter and venomous as vitriol.

E.M. Brent-Dyer, The school at the chalet (1925), 95

The colour of old brown sherry

Madge Bettany was good to look at. She was slight to the verge of thinness, with a well-poised head covered by a mop of curly dark brown hair.  Her eyes were dark brown too - the colour of old brown sherry - and were shaded by long, upcurling, black lashes.

E.M. Brent-Dyer, The school at the chalet (1925), 5

Amazingly, this description is on the very first page of the entire sequence of chalet school stories. I am heartened to think that teenage girls of the 1920s would have been expected to know what old sherry looked like.

Labyrinthine tales of faction-fighting and off-the-record press briefings that reminded me of nothing so much as the British Labour Party

Azhar, they told me, was not the meek and inoffensive character he seemed, a point they illustrated by recounting labyrinthine tales of faction-fighting and off-the-record press briefings that reminded me of nothing so much as the British Labour Party. Eventually we turned to English cricket, and I was asked, why weren't Ramprakash and Hussain given the same number of chances as Hick? Before I could answer I was told, 'It's about this'. My colleague was touching the brown skin on his forearm.

M. Marqusee, War minus the shooting (1996), 121

If men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed

There is true art in it, this command of tea and dinner tables; this animating correctness. Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed

M. Cunningham, The Hours (1998), 83-84