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4 unusual facts about Harold Acton


Christopher Hollis

His last book, Oxford in the Twenties (1976) is about his wide circle of friends, including Evelyn Waugh, Maurice Bowra, Harold Acton, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and the cricketer R. C. Robertson-Glasgow.

Duchess Violante Beatrice of Bavaria

To quell any future tiffs regarding precedence, Cosimo III appointed Violante Beatrice Governor of Siena, whose duties as such kept her away from the Tuscan court, and gave her possession of the Villa di Lappeggi, which became, in the words of historian Harold Acton, "a sort of literary academy".

Guy Burgess

Harold Acton, in More Memoirs of an Aesthete, recalls meeting him at the beginning of World War II: "The most vindictive of these guys was Guy Burgess, later to win notoriety as one of the "Missing Diplomats", though nobody could have been less diplomatic".

Oxford bags

The style was commonly thought to have been invented by Harold Acton of Christ Church.


Gary Conklin

He also has produced and directed a documentary about English literary society during the period after World War I until World War II, which includes Stephen Spender, Anthony Powell, Harold Acton, James Lees-Milne, Peter Quennell, Christopher Isherwood, and Diana Mosley.


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