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“... the famous Somerset Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the United States followed suit in 1808. Slavery in the British West Indies was abolished in 1834, and even the tenacious ...”

“... of the world at large, are obviously at stake, and in their engagements with these, both Henry Louis Gates and Patricia Williams offer despatches from various front lines of what have been called the ‘culture wars’. What is at stake is the meaning of the term ‘America’, and Gates and Williams take their place among a growing number of ...”

“... outrageous performances as a Goon Show script or a night at the music hall. Amos Barking, alias Henry Swansea (the name under which he enlisted in the Civil Service), is a professional liar who in some hard-to-pin-down sense is searching for the truth about himself: in other words, he is our old friend the unreliable narrator. His story, however, is a ...”

“... Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed ...”

“... coxcombs and humbugs of travel, or pretended travel. The best-known is Louis de Rougemont, alias Henry Green, who fooled the Wide World magazine in 1898 with his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged ...”

“... childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of ...”

“... On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere ...”

“... before his death, also proliferated: the most famous, the story of his cloak, first appeared in Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England of 1662. Ralegh’s collected works have been published twice, first in 1751 and then in eight volumes by Oxford University Press in 1829. His apotheosis came as the subject of what is possibly the most famous ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...”

“... unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the experiences of six novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to ...”

“... of the Justice Department, and therefore part of the executive branch of the US government. Henry Petersen, the assistant attorney-general who handled the Watergate investigation, loyally reported his findings to the president and his officials, including the White House counsel, John Dean. As 1972 was an election year, the strategy of the White House ...”

“... school at 16, worked as a secretary, and wrote stories and poems to bring in cash. She met Dylan Thomas after their work appeared in the same paper: ‘He had won a prize for a poem … I knew it was derivative and I knew from what.’ They were briefly engaged, and she and her mother visited his family in Wales. She remembers someone remarking on ...”

“... from the sand, the way they had watched their mothers glean loose sheaves from the fields. Thomas Peck, a labourer, gathered around twelve pounds of raisins, ‘which he did put into the sleeves of his coat and carry home with him’. The wife of Henry Harvest found only half that number, with ‘a great deal of ...”

“... Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour made their celluloid expedition there in the 1940s. Sir Thomas More, who first wrote of the place, lost his head completely, for non-Utopian reasons, and since then a succession of charismatic cranks, frenzied philosophers and visionary vegetarians have aspired to realise heaven upon earth while more usually ...”

“... in the Commons responded to Wilberforce’s motion by voting for an amendment suggested by Henry Dundas, MP for Edinburgh and secretary of state for the Home Office, which backed abolition – but ‘gradual abolition’, in four years’ time, or seven, when the time was right. And even that more moderate resolution went too far for the House of ...”