Public evidence record
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book / uses
“Then during the pandemic, I started reading the Waverley novels, and it’s all there: all the fundamental dilemmas that were raised, not just by the Glorious Revolution, but prior to that by the Civil War of the 17th century, and that were raised again in the 1745 Jacobite rising.”
book / uses
“I read Taylor as a schoolboy, beginning with the Illustrated History of the First World War, which is a potboiler, really, but it’s just full of fantastic writing.”
book / uses
“Then, when we read Democracy in America, it became even clearer what Tocqueville’s project was, which was to show why France had failed to be or could not be the United States, and why American liberty had a very distinctive set of institutional supports.”
book / likes
“It’s that juxtaposition of breaking down California in which people are online half the time and great flotillas of illegal migrants that I love about Snow Crash.”
Claim ledger
9 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“Then during the pandemic, I started reading the Waverley novels, and it’s all there: all the fundamental dilemmas that were raised, not just by the Glorious Revolution, but prior to that by the Civil War of the 17th century, and that were raised again in the 1745 Jacobite rising.”
02 / evaluation
“Because Collingwood brilliantly captured what it is that historians are engaged in doing and put it better than anybody I’ve read.”
03 / evaluation
“You read these books, I think, with a certain suspension of disbelief because the authors are signaling to you that there’s something slightly camp going on here, that it’s not to be taken too seriously.”
04 / evaluation
“That was the kind of thing that you could say in Cambridge in the early 1990s at high table to put some young upstart in his place. But Quinton’s a brilliant man, and I think he had a huge, an ultimately admirable influence on the way that Cambridge did political thought because he insisted on contextualizing the documents and insisted that we don’t read texts as if they are handed to us on stone tablets, that one has to understand Italian ideas of republicanism by delving deeply into the contexts in which someone like Machiavelli worked.”
05 / evaluation
“At the same time, I think Taylor’s method — because it strictly adhered to the diplomatic documents — led him to the very appealing conclusion that Hitler was just a traditional German statesman, and the war was a kind of accident, mainly due to misunderstandings.”
06 / evaluation
“He’s like a one-man combination of Johnson and Boswell because he’s — at one and the same time — attracted by the romance of the Jacobites and the romance of revolutionaries, too, but he’s also conscious that, really, you’re better off with the sober bourgeois existence that’s on offer in Glasgow and Edinburgh.”
07 / evaluation
“Whereas, unfortunately, a significant proportion of my countrymen in Scotland seem to believe that there could be a People’s Republic of Scotland, a terrible idea in my view.”
08 / evaluation
“He’s fantastically scathing in his review of Kissinger’s first book, a review that I only found by chance — this is A World Restored, a book that has many merits, but Taylor despised it because of its flourishes and the fact that they’re not really anchored in the documents.”
09 / evaluation
“This is a deeply unfashionable view. It has made me a hate figure for the academic left because, in the last 20 years, it has become mandatory to regard imperialism as an unmitigated evil, to dismiss economic cost-benefit arguments, to ignore counterfactual rigor, and just to engage in a massive act of condescension to the past, and this is the opposite of what Collingwood had in mind.”