“... Eventually a younger generation of African-American scholars, prominent among them Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr, came round and paid respects to The Confessions of Nat Turner, and some even designated Styron the inadvertent father of the postmodern slave narrative, but by then he may have been so bruised by the initial beatdown that it wasn’t much ...”

“... difficult for anyone to have a clue what was being said about the state of England with the vile Henry Brooke and Enoch Powell in the cabinet. If a trip into town wasn’t to your hangover’s liking, there was the warm suburban welcome of the Magdala in South End Green in Hampstead’s lower depths, where Ruth Ellis had shot her lover (look, they’ve ...”

“... of the power to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... Most of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...”

“... Once in Kitale, Geoffrey, without his wife’s knowledge, withdrew the accusation of cow-bell theft and complained only that the Suk were without their kipandes. Was it necessary, or at least wise, to report the matter at all? Helen would testify that, with police encouragement, the settlers had become accustomed to dealing with ‘small ...”

“... life, were Abraham Lincoln and Steffens anomalies. As early as the 1940s, she supported the Henry Wallace campaign (he would eventually become Roosevelt’s vice-president), working as an usher for at least one Progressive Party rally. Her 1962 notes praise Eleanor Roosevelt for ‘her devotion to mankind’. In a black notebook dated around ...”

“... a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching ...”

“... simple chauvinism of War and Peace, the mysticism in Anna Karenina, the agrarian socialism of the Bell, the declared utilitarianism of On Liberty. The result is to make each sound somewhat closer to their commentator than it really is. His readings of Vico and Herder, the major subjects of his later work, show the same proprietary impulse. Seeing them ...”

“... Brazilian sugar and cotton from the Southern states. It blots the reputation of such liberals as Henry Brougham and Macaulay that they argued for a free trade that effectively maintained slavery, even though it was bound to be harder to abolish slavery globally than to repurpose Liverpool’s slave ships when market forces made the processing of slave-grown ...”

“... Order’ has been a subject of dispute ever since it was issued.British Nazi sympathisers, like Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the Otter, claimed that Hitler was showing friendship to his British ‘cousins’ by deliberately allowing their army to escape. Two facts stand in the way of this Compassionate-Führer theory. First, Dunkirk’s immediate ...”

“... expanding boundary. Grandin quotes a letter Clare Boothe Luce sent in the 1940s to her husband, Henry, the publisher of Time, in which she wrote that, with the end of the country’s territorial expansion, America could survive as a nation only by preserving its ‘racial and cultural homogeneity’ with ‘strict barriers against further immigrations of ...”

“... of the 11th International Brigade (he is the model for Hemingway’s General Hans in For Whom the Bell Tolls). He was also, according to information received by MI5, the ‘leader of the OGPU’ – one of the KGB’s predecessors – ‘in Madrid’. In 1939, this ‘notorious’ and ‘particularly dangerous’ man was briefly in London before being ...”

“... critic, having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the ...”

“... is feeling nothing, just turning sharply to leave the flat, and business-like, ringing the bell on the door opposite. We didn’t know them, but a woman answered the door and I said, politely: ‘My mother’s ill, can you help, please?’ A very practical kid. A bit of a cold fish, she must have thought when she entered the bedroom and found my mad ...”

“... her playmates to the children of Harvard professors. As an infant, she was placed in the arms of Henry David Thoreau (apparently he couldn’t tell which end of the baby was which).In 1877, she met David Todd, a ‘blond with magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had ...”