“... 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 ...”

“... plenty to choose from – involves the Dallas banker who threw a lavish party, came dressed as Henry VIII and fed lion meat to his guests. Back in the mutinous 1960s, James Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie ...”

“... by his UN colleague Brian Urquhart, and a perceptive study by the Berkeley historian Charles Henry that treats Bunche both as a significant figure in his own right and as a prism through which to examine America’s racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new ...”

“... on and off, since last September. As the crew packs up I go and have another look at the tomb of Henry III’s children in the south ambulatory which I’ve just read incorporates one of the medieval relics of the Abbey, the stone supposedly with the imprint of Christ’s foot when he took off for the Ascension. I’m not sure if this is the square stone on ...”

“... J.A. Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come ...”

“... royal favour in an effort to free themselves from the jurisdiction of the bishop and diocese of Lincoln. Papal recognition was next sought and gained, but in all subsequent periods Oxford was far more inclined to appeal for assistance to the Crown than to Rome. On its part, the Crown soon perceived the advantages of a strong university tie from which it ...”

“... purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight ...”

“... from Woody Allen, honorary doctorates, panel appearances (at one such event, she announced that Henry James was ‘the greatest American female novelist’). The final chapter of A Splendid Intelligence is titled ‘Literary Lion’, and the last 27 years of Hardwick’s life, from 1980 until her death in 2007, are crammed into fifty uneventful pages. She ...”

“... Institute, for example, which sent Horace Mann Bond (president of Nkrumah’s alma mater, Lincoln University) to the conference, was a CIA front.The USSR was entering a period of renewed enthusiasm for the Third World. The break with Stalinism that was marked by Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 provided an opportunity to ...”

“... radicalism; he turned from criticising capitalism to criticising the people who had rallied around Henry Wallace. Westbrook is made uncomfortable by this turn, but since I think that what has been called ‘the romance of American Communism’ was a disaster for the American Left, and that the Cold War was a good war, I am inclined to shrug off Westbrook’s ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was wholly ...”

“... among the weird Kenneth Baker anthology that is Poets’ Corner. Dylan Thomas summoned alongside Henry James. A sampler of dubious quotations. A head of Blake with gaping Bedlam sockets instead of eyes. The Tate no longer has its Blake watercolours in glass cases under felt in a remote basement. Blake is on the poster, a featured artist, upstairs, his ...”

“... the sign on the gable end of the building on the opposite side of the street as the curve of Lincoln Place comes into view. It says ‘Finn’s Hotel’. It was where she worked. Funny the sign hasn’t faded more. Tourists must love it. Proof if you need proof. He got two books out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on ...”

“... to meet the sages of the East. In Sri Lanka, the most influential of these spiritual tourists was Henry Steel Olcott, a former Union Army colonel and theosophist from New Jersey whose profile appears on Sri Lankan stamps and who is claimed as one of the ‘heroes of independence’. After the American Civil War, Olcott grew disgusted by what he saw as the ...”