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“... of the Huntingdon Japanese garden from 1923. Founded in 1919 by the millionaire rail magnate Henry Huntington, the estate now contains a group of museums that display paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds alongside Boucher tapestries, the 15th-century Ellesmere Chaucer, the autograph manuscript of Thoreau’s Walden, and documents and letters belonging ...”

“... fabled three-hour tussles between the Illinois senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in 1858 (which certainly did involve direct confrontation), all on the single subject of slavery. In the 1920s, the League of Women Voters sponsored a ten-month series of radio debates, not between presidential candidates but between ...”

“... The first thing​ people noticed about Henry, perhaps the only thing they noticed, was his droopy left eyelid. He was blond, of medium height for the times and pleasant looking, but otherwise unremarkable. Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex, insipiens, inutilis ...”

“... expanding it the better to coerce others, these are Vidal’s favourite subjects. His versions of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Emperor Julian are all more or less dictatorial. ‘How candid I am,’ Vidal’s Julian says. ‘I have never admitted to anyone that in my first encounter with Constantius, all that I could think about was how much I should like ...”

“... the Atlantic. In 1860, he was asked to write a campaign biography for the largely unknown Abraham Lincoln. Drawing on his own boyhood memories as well as the facts of Lincoln’s life, Howells made the story of a young man’s rise from the frontier into a mythic tale. With the money he earned from the ...”

“... truth was that Griffith was the embodiment of that magnificent new art: he was to cinema what Henry Ford was to industrial production. Griffith introduced narrative suspense and emotional identification to the movies. He began making two-reel films in 1907, and after turning out hundreds of them he had learned how to use editing to create dramatic ...”

“... middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and ...”

“... On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell ...”

“... mystic heptagon upon the map. This is a church dedicated to the classic small-boy victim, Hugh of Lincoln, to be built among the alleys and foul closes of Moorfields. Here the detective comes at the climax of the story, as victim or as murderer. The older world is rendered with total conviction and an unflagging sense of period. Ackroyd is able to do as much ...”

“... was my master.’ Ten years later he said his father might have been a mulatto. In other words, as Henry Louis Gates put it, Douglass ‘completely diminished the whiteness and the masterness of his father over ten years’. In his 1854 essay ‘The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered’, Douglass stated baldly that ‘intellect is uniformly derived ...”

“... It’s odd to think that Abraham Lincoln was killed by an actor, because most of the memorable American Presidents to follow him were actors in their blood. Eisenhower excelled in the part of the sturdy veteran who’d come home to tidy the porch, and Nixon was every part in The Godfather rolled into one. But it took Ronald Reagan to drive the matter past the point of absurdity: president of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as star of Bedtime for Bonzo ...”

“... long term less than a total success. Margaret Bowker’s The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland 1521-47 (1981) swung the debate like Middle America in a Presidential election, since this large swathe of rural England, extending from the Humber to the Thames, appeared to contain very little precocious Protestantism; while Susan ...”

“... her impressionist style. Her impression of screen-drama, when it was fairly new, is as fresh as Henry Green’s, in Living. An Italian girl watches a film in which the star, Algenib, is kissed by Lord Southsea in a smart uniform – and remembers that her own first lover was not English and wore no uniform, and how ashamed she was when she revealed the ...”

“... considered typical of an ancient Chinese emperor, he summoned them in the afternoon. Nixon, Henry Kissinger and an aide called Winston Lord quickly got into a limousine with Zhou and set off, leaving Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, frantic with worry over their security. They entered Mao’s house, finding it ‘simple and ...”

“... removal of history from literature to deboning a chicken’. She was taught to echo Henry James in The Tragic Muse: ‘The subject doesn’t matter, it’s the treatment, the treatment!’ This treatment was valued if it was ‘mature’, a word always on the lips of tutors and graduate assistants: mature art ‘rose above the passions of ...”