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“... didn’t take long for him to become spectacularly successful. In 1953, he starred on Broadway in William Inge’s Picnic, in which he was ‘stiff and wooden but an actor’, according to the film director Sidney Lumet. John Foreman told Stern that every studio wanted him after that, and he officially became the ‘hot guy’. Over the next few years he just ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... Kennedy spoke to just before he was shot – ‘He was always alert for a glimpse of Sisters,’ William Manchester says with unconscious irony – re-lives and reconstructs that day in November 1963, teaches history to her pupils as an immediate and bewildering experience. Oswald gets ready, thinks he is to kill Governor Connally, not Kennedy; David ...”

“... and intolerance.In March 1706, in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote excitedly to the Swiss biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc. ‘There is,’ he declared, ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon whom the affairs ...”

“... removal of the chains of lunatics at Bicêtre, and the establishment of the York Retreat by William Tuke, inaugurate the psychiatric enlightenment. The development of the asylum bears witness to the increasing ability to distinguish between the mad and the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John ...”

“... the bath with baby Jesus; a man in a Windsor carving playing ‘horsey’ with a small child; and William the Marshal, handed over as a hostage by his father at the age of six and then subject to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who hadn’t got the heart even to frighten him. Clearly ...”

“... a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the ...”

“... first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of ...”

“... as someone who, though odd, could ‘write wonderfully about the external, everyday world’; and William Carlos Williams, busy writing Paterson, is admired for his practice of going to the park on Sundays where he ‘watched what people did and made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s ...”

“... Factories Acts designed to protect workers from injury or death. And when in 1863 a builder called Cooper found that the Wandsworth Board of Works had ordered him to pull down a house he owned without first giving him a chance to be heard, the Court of Exchequer struck down the order, not on the officious backbencher’s ground that Parliament must have ...”

“... groups. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals – fronted by Gary Cooper, Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan (the last perhaps still smarting from his failed attempt to join the Party in 1938) – presented the acceptable face of red-baiting. The HUAC targeted screenwriters; only one of the initial ‘Unfriendly Nineteen’ had ...”

“... popular and respected head of PR, appoint a new PR chief in the shape of the phone-slinging Keith Cooper and allow unconditional access to the cameras that put the House on television in January 1996. Isaacs’s lack of judgment remains baffling. Maybe it’s some consolation to him that when Lord Chadlington, the head of Shandwick, one of the most successful ...”

“... black Britain. From then on he was rarely out of the news: encouraged by Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, he penned execrable verse, topical examples of which he sent to Chairman Mao who rapidly telexed back his response; when Muhammad Ali came to London for his championship fight with Henry Cooper, Michael X ...”

“... argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at ...”