“... She composed his own epitaph, which was carved in black marble. It read: Here lie the Ashes of Henry Rider Haggard Knight Bachelor Knight of the British Empire Who with a Humble Heart Strove to Serve his Country Nothing there about his ripping yarns, the first of which had been hyped, in 1885, as ‘The Most Amazing Story Ever Written’. The ...”

“... were also granted by authorities other than the Crown, a practice ended by statute in 1536, when Henry VIII obtained sole and exclusive authority ‘to pardon or remit any treasons, murders, manslaughters or any kinds of felonies’. By the time of the American Revolution, four features of the royal prerogative of pardon deserve mention. First, the reigning ...”

“... they supervised imprisonment orders made anywhere, by anyone, for any reason.’ Chief Justice Sir Henry Montagu, writing in 1619, described habeas corpus as a ‘writ of the prerogative by which the king demands account for his subject who is restrained of his liberty’. It was a remedy developed, primarily, in the court of King’s (and ...”

“... in Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.There were other ways of waging ‘limited war’. In 1957, Henry Kissinger argued for smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Kaufmann and others pulled his argument apart by showing how easily the use of small nuclear weapons on the battlefield would escalate to full thermonuclear exchange. But this wasn’t enough to stop ...”

“... antagonism to Bush’s deliberate pace and prose. Like those establishment figures, epitomised by Henry Kissinger, who are the self-conscious heirs of the Anglo-European conservative tradition in foreign policy, with its emphasis on balance and order, liberal commentators were moved by a sensation of danger impending from a massive convulsion within the ...”

“... into the mountain to pray, Himself, Alone.’ The title also reminded me of a revealing moment in Henry McDonald’s earlier biography (a mere 340 pages, published in 2000), when a friend describes bumping into Trimble in the law courts in Belfast on the day his divorce from his first wife was granted: ‘I remember being surprised to see him on his own. He ...”

“... it were prompted by the appearance in the Contemporary Review of January 1874 of an article by Sir Henry Thompson – physician, surgeon, nutritionist, porcelain collector, artist, novelist and father of the modern cremation movement – entitled ‘The Treatment of the Body after Death’: After detailing the post-mortem changes occurring to the body and the ...”

“... Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell (1611), a book which, mock-patronised by Prince Henry, is introduced by laboriously facetious mock-encomiums from 56 poets, Donne and Jonson among them. None of the other tributes, however, is so distinctively and explicitly nonsensical as that by Hoskyns: Cabalistical Verses, which by transposition of ...”

“... there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s birth); there’s one by Henry Lamb, painted in 1914; there’s one by Dora Carrington from 1916. In Meade’s book, I was most struck by the following passage about a party in Los Angeles. (Parker, in addition to writing both poetry and fiction, not to mention reviews for the New ...”

“... lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two adopted boys. When Lord Mount Cashell (who is all but banished from the journals) went off to Orleans, the two women, escorted ...”

“... It would take only two hundred years for this earth to be pounded into dust. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths are among Australia’s most creative historians. Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996) has become the most quoted work of Australian history in new research, and Bonyhady’s The Colonial Earth ...”

“... 1932 with T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, whom he was about to leave, she stands calmly beside Tom. Vivienne, seemingly excluded by the successful pair, stands at a distance, hands clasped behind her back, feet together, dressed entirely in white. She was ‘wild as Ophelia’, Woolf wrote, but ‘alas no Hamlet would love her, with her powdered ...”

“... Over the Missouri, over the Seine,   Over the Thames, and over the Severn, The soul of white Tom   Shall float to Heaven – to Hardy’s ‘rather monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s ...”

“... Fetchit, of the famous boy aviator, Charles Lindbergh. He admired the anti-union, anti-semitic Henry Ford, the prounion FDR, and, like many other Americans, as well as Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini. Taken aback when the dictator greeted him with the Fascist salute, Rogers ducked and said: ‘Don’t shoot.’ Will Rogers denied ever uttering his ...”

“... the paintings in the artist’s room line up as an audience or congregation, and a priest, Father Tom, hovers among them, trying to make himself heard over an actual conversation between the artist and his friend on the soundtrack. Johnny, remembering the priest from his childhood, says: ‘We’ve always drowned your voice with our shouting.’ A good thing ...”