In fact, he had always been as thin-skinned as he was buccaneering, and if, by his own measure, he was "quite a practical person" all his life, he was also, as this huge new compilation of personal papers shows, a man of outsize sentiment -- a poignant, misunderstood dragon, more complicated, perhaps, than any of his children except Bobby, that other improbable combination of rapacity and romance.
The IWM's first-world-war collections include around 10,000 bundles of personal papers, including letters and diaries written by all manner of people, from serving soldiers to Kentish housewives.
At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers (none of which has survived) with a Rosicrucian physician his close friend Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands.
They're found, when and if they're found, in desk drawers and office file cabinets that no one has cracked in years, or in library stacks, or in jumbles of personal papers boxed up in an artist's studio.
He put the prints and negatives he had made in a desk drawer, and they remained unseen until a cataloger discovered them in the archives of personal papers that Ginsberg had given to Columbia University, his alma mater.
Letters between Tennessee Williams and Peter Brook in which the playwright pleads that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof be produced as he originally wrote it are among an enormous cache of personal papers acquired by the V&A.
One security conscious commenter on the Engadget consumer electronics blog addressed the privacy implications of the oversize bills given the limitations of personal paper shredders, by speculating on whether it would be more practical to dispose of these large bills by burning them to protect personal information.
Columbia University expects to take delivery later this year of the first shipment of the personal papers of MURRAY KEMPTON, the late New York journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for commentary.
They sold a collection of more than 10,000 of his personal papers and books in 2006 for $32m, a collection now housed at Morehouse College, King's alma mater.
The 25,000 pages of her personal papers and those of her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, and policy adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, are being put online today by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation in one of the most ambitious projects of its kind.
Late on Christmas night, as she convalesced, her house suffered a devastating fire, consuming many of her personal papers and belongings, including "most of her private collection of Confederate artifacts".
