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“... of anecdotes and an enviable spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the ...”

“... of 20th-century wartime propaganda, brought into existence around the time of Olivier’s film of Henry V. The core of the Tory intellectualism of Salisbury is democracy’s opposite: pessimistic, anti-urban, openly seeking class conflict in order to strengthen the hand of authority and the ancien régime. Salisbury was skilled in questions of international ...”

“... 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 Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere ...”

“... whose commitment to this and other left-wing causes, including the Presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, had led to their ostracism by Montgomery society. The Durrs arranged for her to attend a training session at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a meeting ground for labour and civil rights radicals, where activists were trained and ...”

“... and excavated the records of the various political campaigns of the Forties, in particular Henry Wallace’s third-party challenge to Truman. That the culture of the Popular Front – the 1936-39 and 1941-47 anti-Fascist, pro-union alliance of liberals, New Dealers and American Stalinists – has been so neglected is thanks not just to Cold War ...”

“... of animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of sublimation was involved in both ...”

“... Paz said of him.On Sunday 2 July we went to see a production of Don Giovanni, with sets by Henry Moore. During the interval my wife Betty said to me all of a sudden: ‘Look who’s behind us.’ It was Ezra Pound, walking alongside Henry Moore. ‘If it were Mallarmé I would go to greet him,’ Paz said, ‘But ...”

“... confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before ...”

“... a baronetcy for his services to the Whigs) sold it to a consortium of Peelites headed by Lord Lincoln. He tried to make it a condition of sale that the paper should continue to support his former patron, but not surprisingly the consortium, who detested Palmerston, ‘flatly refused’. Until this transfer, the Morning Chronicle accorded to Palmerston ...”

“... special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than his beloved Henry James) and meets the love of his life, a unique Greek called Nikos Stangos. The boys were fascinated by Bloomsbury – the books, the people, the scarves, the gossip – which led them to venerate Stephen Spender as one of its last links. Squeezed into a ...”

“... King Jr was a serious student of philosophy and theology, drawing on the writings of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to develop a powerful justification for disobedience to unjust laws. At a time when only 2 per cent of the Black population had graduated from college, King exemplified the ‘talented tenth’ to whom W.E.B. Du Bois looked for racial ...”

“... in the state in which he possessed and left them.’The presence of a one-volume collection of Henry More’s Philosophical Poems, Platonic Song of the Soul (‘fine copy, gilt edges’) and a ‘good sound copy’ of Speght’s 1598 Chaucer added to the collection’s value. But so, paradoxically, did the battered condition of the other books. Lamb’s ...”

“... to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and Poverty’ (the title of Henry George’s bestseller of the 1880s), New York today is more polarised economically than anywhere else in the US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to ...”

“... to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a 17th-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, it eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed ...”

“... to break up and the journey is redeemed by a vision on the eastern horizon of the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, caught in the late light of the setting sun. It’s the kind of thing that would have immensely excited me as a boy (and quite excites me now). I’ve driven up and down this road hundreds of times and never seen it before, but that’s because ...”