ABSTRACT
The idea of a Festschrift for Harold Jenkins developed in April, 1985 when he revisited Iona College to conduct a seminar on his study of Henry IV. Harold Jenkins was born in Shenley, Buckinghamshire, on July 19, 1909 and was educated at Wolverton Grammar School and University College London. Dr Brooks, Harold Jenkins’ friend for forty years and his partner for more than twenty, has shared a wealth of perceptive reminiscence. Harold Brooks notes Harold Jenkins’ constant concern for the quality of the writing in Introductions and Notes. His learning, judgement, humane sympathy, wit, humour, and – presiding over all – his immense critical sanity make anything written by Harold Jenkins worth the reading. Harold Brooks compares him to Shaw’s Bohun in You Never Can Tell, whose specialty is ‘being right, when other people are wrong’, and Kathleen Tillotson epitomizes his gift as ‘the trick of stating what thereupon seemed obvious, though nobody had seen it before’.
