28 Facts About Harold Acton

Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton was a British writer, scholar, and aesthete who was a prominent member of the Bright Young Things.

Harold Acton was born near Florence, Italy, to a prominent Anglo-Italian family.

Harold Acton co-founded the avant-garde magazine The Oxford Broom and mixed with many intellectual and literary figures of the age, including Evelyn Waugh, who based the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited partly on him.

Between the wars, Acton lived in Paris, London, and Florence, proving most successful as a historian, his magnum opus being a 3-volume study of the Medicis and the Bourbons.

Harold Acton was knighted in 1974 and died in Florence, leaving La Pietra to New York University.

Harold Acton was born to a prominent Anglo-Italian-American family of baronets, later raised to the peerage as Barons Harold Acton of Aldenham at Villa La Pietra, his parents' house one mile outside the walls of Florence, Italy.

Harold Acton claimed that his great-great-grandfather was Commodore Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet, who married his niece, Mary Anne Acton, and who was prime minister of Naples under Ferdinand IV and grandfather of the Catholic historian Lord Acton.

Harold Acton's father was the successful art collector and dealer Arthur Acton, the illegitimate son of Eugene Arthur Roger Acton, and counsellor to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.

Arthur Acton met Hortense in Chicago while helping to design the Italianate features of the bank's new building in 1896, and the Mitchell fortune allowed Arthur Acton to buy the remarkable Villa La Pietra on the hills of Florence, where Harold Acton lived for much of his life.

In October 1923, Harold Acton went up to Oxford to read Modern Greats at Christ Church.

Harold Acton was regarded as a leading figure of his day and would often receive more attention in memoirs of the period than men who were much more successful in later life; for example, the Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams described this encounter with Harold Acton in his autobiography George :.

Harold Acton is reputed to have inspired, at least in part, the character of "Anthony Blanche" in Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.

People think it was all Harold Acton, who is a much sweeter and saner man [than Howard].

In 1926 Harold Acton acted as a special constable during the general strike, apolitical as he was, and took his degree.

One close observer, Alan Pryce-Jones, felt that life in Florence weighed upon Harold Acton with its triviality, for, like his father, he was a hard worker and a careful scholar.

Harold Acton took up residence in Peking, as Beijing was then known, which he found congenial.

Harold Acton's novel Peonies and Ponies is a sharp portrait of expatriate life.

Harold Acton translated Glue and Lacquer, selected from the 17th-century writer Feng Menglong's Tales to Rouse the World, with a preface by Arthur Waley, the leading scholar-translator and member of the Bloomsbury Group.

The Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, but Harold Acton did not leave until 1939, when he returned to England and joined the Royal Air Force as a liaison officer.

Harold Acton served in India and what was then Ceylon, and then after the Liberation in Paris.

Harold Acton was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1965 and knighted in 1974.

Harold Acton was Catholic; his cultural and historical commitment to the Church remained unchanged throughout his life.

Harold Acton's name was first on a petition submitted to Rome in 1971 by British cultural elite, requesting that the traditional Latin rite of the Mass not be abrogated in England.

Harold Acton was a prominent member of the Bright Young Things in 1920s London.

Plante described the young men whom Harold Acton welcomed to La Pietra, including Alexander Zielcke, a German photographer and artist who was Harold Acton's lover for the last twenty-five years of his life.

When Harold Acton died he left Villa La Pietra to New York University.

In leaving his family's property and collection to New York University, Harold Acton expressed his desire that the estate be used as a meeting place for students, faculty, and guests who might study, teach, write and do research, and as a centre for international programs.

Harold Acton was buried beside his parents and brother in the Catholic section of the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in the southern suburb of Florence, Galluzzo.