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“... not an era of conciliation’. ‘I understand,’ he wrote, ‘that no one, except perhaps Lincoln, ever ran for the presidency on a tragic sense of life; but if it is possible to be too old in spirit, it is possible also to be too young.’ I think Wieseltier raises the right point, but gets it the wrong way round. For a tragic sense of life is ...”

“... Roosevelt’ (a grinning Nancy replacing Teddy Roosevelt between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore); ‘If Nancy Was a Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci’ (her stolid features and purposeful stomp sketched on a sheet of Old Master drawings between noble profiles, sorrowing Madonnas, plaintive putti and snarling lions); ‘If Nancy Was the ...”

“... highly strung, strikingly nervous, with a tendency to disintegrate in moments of extreme crisis. Henry Kissinger, who saw a lot of him a few years later, noticed that ‘he is nervous, partly because of his personal insecurity, partly for physiological reasons … You will find his hands perpetually in motion, twirling his watch chain … flicking ashes from ...”

“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself ...”

“... was of a piece with his distaste for over-explanation. An admirer of Jane Austen, he hated Henry James for his characters’ ‘unpleasant arid curiosity’. He might have felt the same about Dery, who is similarly prone to ‘inexhaustible questionings, probings, pryings, comparings’. ‘If anyone ever literally died of curiosity,’ Gorey wrote in ...”

“... deathbed scribblings of Robert Greene, but is nowadays attributed to its ostensible ‘editor’, Henry Chettle. It scoffingly refers to him as ‘Shake-scene’ and calls him an ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’, in other words a plagiarist. This episode is the subject of a very interesting essay by Andy Kesson. Sociologically speaking, his ...”

“... I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of them, I suppose. One ...”

“... Writers ought to mix socially with the people they write about. Full marks would have gone to Henry James for his heroic dining out, but nul points to Dickens. ‘He knows the dry arches of London Bridge better than Belgravia. He excels in inventories of poor furniture and is learned in pawnbrokers’ tickets.’ But he had never penetrated the haute ...”

“... War. For well over a century white Southerners identified the Republicans as the party of Abraham Lincoln and rejected these Northern meddlers at the polls. In 1950 the Republicans had no senators from the South and only a couple of congressmen. Conversely, some blacks continued to acknowledge that the Republican friends of big business had once been the ...”

“... Americans were employed from the start as labourers in Civil War army camps. But Abraham Lincoln waited until almost two years into the war to authorise the enlistment of Black combat soldiers. (This was one provision of the Emancipation Proclamation.) Some 200,000 Black men had served in the Union army and navy by the end of the war. Confined to ...”

“... The English-language version put the emphasis on the ‘war on terror’: Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, he said, would have done what he did to preserve the ‘integrity of their country’ – the mention of Lincoln was obviously intended for the US market. In Pakistan’s military academies the usual soldier-heroes are ...”

“... The new owner of the bookstore was a young man called Edward Drury, whose father was a printer in Lincoln. Drury read Clare’s prospectus and saw an opportunity. He paid off Clare’s bill and went to see him. Clare had been about to go to Yorkshire in search of work – the family was two years behind with the rent and on the point of eviction – but Drury ...”

“... and he shook hands with every pupil after evening prayers. Next came the chancellorship of Lincoln cathedral in 1872, and five years later an invitation to become the first bishop of Truro. Six years after that, when he was still supervising the construction of the first new cathedral in England since the Reformation, he was appointed archbishop of ...”

“... strangulation, his Sketch of a Negro Code which he allowed to be sent to Pitt’s home secretary Henry Dundas in 1792. Under the Code, there would be strict controls over the transport of slaves: breathing room, diet, medical treatment. On arrival, there were to be severe criminal sanctions against maltreatment or the seizure of their property; plantations ...”

“... from the 1840s onwards. One of the Genoveses’ most prominent subjects, the politician James Henry Hammond, provides telling testimony against their thesis. If Hammond was a God-fearing Christian who read his Bible faithfully, he had a strange way of showing it. In the mid-1840s, he was driven from the governor’s mansion in Charleston when word leaked ...”