• Rare Manuscript: Only Mr. Eric Osborne of Dawson’s bookshop, Pall Mall, spotted the possible significance of the manuscript book squeezed in between “A book of recipes” and “Methodist Miscellanea” in the catalogue at Christie’s auction room in London. The catalogue described it as containing 68 leaves in various Elizabethan hands, and including recipes, remedies, passages of Latin, and “divers ditties to be sung.” When finally Lot 172 was knocked down to Osborne for £360 he began a careful examination to see whether his hunch (based upon a rather devilishly casual survey in the auction room before bidding began) had paid off. It had—even beyond his expectations. In addition to some twenty Elizabethan poems unknown or unpublished, the book contains a new version of a passage of 52 lines from Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece. And from the signature, Richard Waferer, on its vellum cover, may have belonged to a family related to Shakespeare by marriage.
• NR in London: Freedom and the Politicians by national review’s London contributor Anthony Lejeune has been singled out for praise by the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page article on the paucity of present British political literature. Mr. Lejeune “does at least escape from mere bandying of slogans, on the one hand, and rather dreary definitions of party policy in committee language, on the other. He calls in aid the political philosophers from classical times onwards and places the debate, in spite of some subjective excess, firmly on the intellectual plane.”
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