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“... to write an introduction to his Collected Poems, when Betjeman’s old friends John Sparrow or Tom Driberg might have done a better job. ‘Why Lord Birkenhead?’ Hillier asks. Might it be because he was called ‘Lord’? If he had been plain Billy Birkenhead then Betjeman probably wouldn’t have bothered: he liked well-knowns, and being well ...”

“... the second Mrs Piper (‘my silken Myfanwy’) back into his imagined childhood: ‘Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.’ The real Myfanwy decided to start a magazine bright enough to show the world that Britain was not beyond the reach of international art. ‘The battle has been pitched between abstract painting and sculpture and surrealist ...”

“... car had got into his paintings occasionally, and the stones all the time had looked less like big Henry Moores. I wish Nash had learned more from his friend Edward Burra. And so to the dump at Cowley. Totes Meer is quite a large painting – five feet wide and going on for three feet tall – and it puts its new size to good use. Gone is the Chirico ...”

“... that this was code for something else. The letter Bloom received – he was using the pseudonym Henry Flower – from a woman called Martha Clifford in the Lotus-Eaters episode was suggestive: ‘I have never felt so much drawn to a man as you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So ...”

“... Milly disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form of an attack on existing fictional ...”

“... is as much as anything the famous painting of his death in a Holborn attic done in the 1850s by Henry Wallis – with the poet lying, across the bed in a kind of frozen entrechat. It looks like an enlargement of the postcard which, in an age of mechanical reproduction, it was to become, commemorating the tourist attraction which it was also to become. The ...”

“... is an invaluable account of its evolution, told by Martin Hickman of the Independent, and the MP Tom Watson. Watson has been particularly close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed Rupert Murdoch’s solid support, that was enough ...”

“... great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some of the best writers in the country, among ...”

“... Sepulture, issued by Chadwick’s General Board of Health and given him by his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, a sanitary engineer. The document presented yet again the horrors of overcrowded urban graveyards, a subject with which Dickens was familiar, having the magnum opus of G.A. Walker (‘Walker of the Graveyards’) already on his bookshelves. On 27 ...”

“... He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more ...”

“... should turn first to Richard Boston’s Book of Practical Jokes in which Donaldson’s hoax ‘Henry Root’ letters are unfavourably compared with Humphrey Berkeley’s hoax ‘Rochester Sneath’ letters and Don Novello’s hoax ‘Lazlo Toth’ letters. Boston remarks that ‘Donaldson’s time as a pimp in Chelsea is recorded in his Both the Ladies and ...”

“... at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that expression the proper tone and ...”

“... in spite of the authoritative nature of their church.’ The second longest entry is on Henry Moore, that £1 million-a-year taxpayer whose sculpture was (and perhaps still is) prominently displayed in fifty cities and two hundred museums. Wisely, he retrained from philosophising and left the interpretation of his work to others. He was ‘the maker ...”

“... of the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to ...”

“... he generates in bed. I began my father’s family tree for his 70th birthday, following a line of Henry Herbert Lights (masons and bricklayers to a man) back to Shrewton, a village in Wiltshire. Genealogy often gets short shrift from professional historians; it’s seen as self-indulgent and myopic, obsessed with the idea of origins. But as the branches ...”