“... and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that Kallman had wept over her poem, which is about seeing a moose during a bus journey. The first reference ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... a film with the Rothschilds’ money’, because he’d cast Stéphane, the daughter of Baron James-Henri de Rothschild.) On the last day of the shoot, Vercors’s wife returned home early and complained that the German officer had shown more respect for their house than the film crew had. ‘But Madame,’ Melville replied, ‘the German wasn’t making ...”

“... service of God. ‘Bound to obey and serve’ was the motto chosen by Jane Seymour when she became Henry VIII’s queen, echoing the glad subservience still proclaimed by the Prince of Wales’s heraldic emblem: Ich dien.The language of heraldry served as a constant reminder that to engage in service was not simply to undertake a prescribed form of labour, but ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s graceful mirror at the end of the 18th century, and Henry Adams’s eerie Wunderkammer at the beginning of the 20th. In this generally disappointing field, Eric Hobsbawm has entered the lists with a work he invites us to read as the ‘flip side’ of Age of Extremes, his great history of the 20th century: ‘not ...”

“... administrations, however much General Sharon would like it to happen. Only the express approval of Henry Kissinger, the then Secretary of State, had allowed the Syrian Army to enter Lebanon in 1976. Syria expanded its military dominance to Lebanon’s Christian heartland in 1991, with the approval of Kissinger’s successor, ...”

“... Grove nightclub, Tony Curtis shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth ...”

“... and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the ...”

“... most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created ...”

“... begins its journey to judgment, lucky, I suppose, not to be seen off with a cheerful message from Henry Kelly. With it being Gerontius I’m surprised the whole thing isn’t a plug for Saga’s ‘specialised insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the ...”

“... of Health and Medicine in Maryland. Einstein’s eyes, meanwhile, were given to his optician Henry Abrams, who kept them in a safe deposit box in New Jersey.People want to get to know Einstein, to see the world through his eyes. Several biographies have appeared over the years. The most scientifically detailed is Subtle Is the Lord by the physicist ...”

“... her playmates to the children of Harvard professors. As an infant, she was placed in the arms of Henry David Thoreau (apparently he couldn’t tell which end of the baby was which).In 1877, she met David Todd, a ‘blond with magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had ...”

“... time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore second-tier oilfields in Iraq. He ...”

“... to 14 countries, including Egypt, India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia.In The Fall of Che Guevara, Henry Ryan, a former US diplomat, argues that Guevara’s diplomacy on behalf of the Cuban regime has often been obscured. It was in this role, Ryan points out, ‘that he best served the Cuban revolution’. From the start, he was associated with the global ...”