“... The recent fuss over the fifth centenary of Henry VIII’s coronation (we will all be heartily sick of him by the end of 2009) has concealed the real surprise in the Tudor achievement: the rebranding of a failed cross-channel state as an island kingdom. In 1485, Henry’s father seized power in what had once been an example to all Europe of how to centralise government in a monarchy ...”

“... did we arrive at a situation in which science holds such sway over our imaginations, and such power, financial not least (Ligo’s total cost is around $620 million)? One answer, almost as old as the events that it describes and subscribed to by many historians, runs something like this. Before 1492, literate Europeans derived their knowledge of the ...”

“... to persuade him to temper his unhealthy lifestyle, they used to point out how awful it would be if Henry Kissinger outlived him. Hitchens spent years pursuing Kissinger in print – and sometimes in person – for his assorted war crimes. He wanted to see him prosecuted at The Hague. Failing that, wouldn’t it be worth forgoing the odd drink or cigarette in ...”

“... the tears of Desdemona, and the outrageousness and ingratitude of Prince George as Prince Hal. Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park remarks that ‘one gets acquainted with Shakespeare without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Shakespeare was certainly very much there in spirit, partly due to the acting of Kean and Mrs ...”

“... in the White House wiretaps also prompted William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other ...”

“... heavily in debt. He didn’t direct his energies to grand episcopal projects like his contemporary Henry of Blois, the wealthy bishop of Winchester, who oversaw the construction of villages, canals, castles, abbeys and smaller churches. Becket concentrated instead on patronising his coterie of followers. Before his appointment as archbishop, he wasn’t even a ...”

“... ad within 24 hours of Phyllida Lloyd’s extraordinary all-female production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, which ends its sell-out London run on 29 November, that the play struck me as an object lesson in masculinity for our times. The posturing Van Damme brought to my mind Jade Anouka’s Hotspur, whose raw verbal and physical energy on the stage turned ...”

“... the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace. The last great city-state in pre-colonial North America, Cahokia, had dissolved two centuries before. Instead, the Spanish encountered a patchwork of peoples stretched thinly across the land, which would have to be won over town by ...”

“... highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes’. It was the tempestuous love between Henry VIII and Anne, it’s said, that managed to topple papal power in England, and turn the country from Catholic to Protestant, before ending in heartbreak, betrayal and judicial murder. This is undeniably a good story, with ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... 1399 to claim his confiscated inheritance as Duke of Lancaster while Richard II was in Ireland, Henry Bolingbroke was greeted tumultuously as the prospective saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his cousin’s power. With ...”

“... without an assurance that the book won’t be mentioned. It has been obvious for years that Henry Kissinger is a monster, a man with heaven knows how much blood on his hands walking round with a Nobel Peace Prize, a man with a reputation like Darth Vader’s and huge amounts of power, influence and ...”

“... University of Paris, who had his book condemned and publicly burned. Only eight years earlier, Henry IV had deposed his cousin Richard II, who died in custody soon afterwards. Richard’s rule was so loathed that the army Henry amassed didn’t have to fight a single battle. Nevertheless, the shadow of usurpation and ...”

“... of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne’. And again, ‘as some saie’, the king had beheaded one of his ...”

“... gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the suggestion in its title of mythic black strength and suffering, together with its encyclopedic range, raise epic expectations. Is this that most elusive of leviathans, a black Moby-Dick, the ...”