I have had a recent exchange of emails with Clive Barnes, who is an old friend from our Folio Society days back in the 1970s. It got me thinking about why I chose to use ‘Plenty of Taste’ as the title of this blog. As I say on my Biography page, I heard the phrase first when used by my then boss Tim Wilkinson, and it has stuck with me ever since. So, in a recent idle moment (of which there are plenty these days) I did some further investigation. I came across this phrase, in a post on the contemporary-art.org blog which attributes it to an article called The New Art Criticism, Westminster Gazette, 20 March 1893, which takes the phrase back to the 19th century

… the sayings of the late Master of Trinity that a certain person had plenty of taste, and all of it bad…

Tim Wilkinson is mentioned in this post on Folio’s page, written by my sometime kind colleague Sue Bradbury who since rose through the Society’s ranks to become its Editorial Director after the time I worked with her. My own five or six years working for Folio in 1970s got mentioned in a book or two, as can be seen in the credit I got in one at the top of this article. The book was the 1979 Folio edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, not the other editions which came later.