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“... He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your ...”

“... and no more. There is no doubt that ceremonial squabbles were widespread under Elizabeth I and James I: nonconformist ministers hit trouble with their parishioners, and parents went off to neighbouring churches to ensure their babies were crossed. The evidence for clashes in the 1630s is less convincing. ‘High ceremonialists’, such as Cosin, Montague ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... and could thump the floor with it. Jacobson cites Tony Hancock (together with Arthur Askey and James Thurber) as his principal literary influence, and one detects the glum eloquence of Anthony Aloysius in passages like the above. It’s probably not coincidental that it was Australia which brought the other comedian to his final suicidal extremity. In ...”

“... at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that expression the proper tone and ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism’), and William James (‘an impassioned empiricism ... declaring the universe to be wild and young’). The Californian ‘humorists’ referred to by Santayana were the product, primarily, of a distinct historical phenomenon – the mining towns which sprang up during and ...”

“... met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather 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 ...”

“... of the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to ...”

“... of workers about the dangers of creeping socialism. Like Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, whose work he deeply admired, Reagan even in the 1950s saw the New Deal welfare state as profoundly dangerous. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – with its health insurance for the old and the poor, its food stamps and easier access ...”

“... origins in their titles: ‘Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees’, ‘Variations on a Theme from James’, ‘After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens’, ‘Variations on a Text by Vallejo’, ‘A Variation on Baudelaire’s “La Servante au grand coeur”’. ‘American Scenes (1904-1905)’ is quarried almost entirely from ...”

“... planting the flag in Landsmark’s body. The man who appears to restrain Landsmark in the photo, James Kelly, an anti-busing leader and later a city councilman, was actually trying to prevent the assault. The photos Forman took next show that Kelly interposed himself between Rakes and Landsmark, calming the crowd. Forman’s photograph alone is an inadequate ...”

“... The Austens, though not rich themselves, had connections in the world of London finance. Brother Henry lived, ‘in the high style expected of a banker’, close to where Harrods now stands. He was duly bankrupted in the slump that followed the end of the war in 1815. The class of gentry that had £400 to £600 a year, the class of the Austen women, is said ...”

“... and Roberts go to Tate Britain to view Chatterton (commonly known as The Death of Chatterton) by Henry Wallis, which was instrumental in turning the 17-year-old poet into an icon: a slender boy with a lead-white face laid out on a rumpled bed, the window open where his soul escaped the degradation of his desolate attic. It was exhibited throughout England ...”

“... of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, commissioned by Boydell from painters including Reynolds and Henry Fuseli. The gallery was an important force behind surging 18th-century bardolatry, and part of Boydell’s broader project to encourage British history painting. The paintings were not for sale but served to attract punters (or ‘patrons of native ...”