“... of the evening told me the following story. In 1945 he had been engaged as a book reviewer for Henry Luce’ Time magazine. Or he thought he had been so engaged. When he turned up for work, he was informed that Whittaker Chambers, chief Pooh-Bah of the ‘back of the book’, wished to see him. He entered the sanctum and found the stout, surly presence ...”

“... Quatermain sequence – which ran to 18 books – is bound, however, to remember the figure of Sir Henry Curtis, Bt. the English Victorian quasi-Viking whom Haggard carefully manoeuvred into situation after situation where he could fulfil the Dasent fantasy and fight, axe in hand and made-in-Birmingham mail-coat belted on, in blameless battle against ...”

“... whom the protagonists dispatch. In Saturday (2005), the successful, self-satisfied neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who happens to live on the leafy London square where McEwan lived at the time, finds his home invaded, a family gathering despoiled and his daughter stripped naked, by a thug called Baxter and his sidekick, Nige. It’s the ultimate middle-class ...”

“... been to be safely married off. But that she intended otherwise is implied by what she wrote to Henry VIII in presenting him with her New Year’s gift for 1546. As his daughter, she would be ‘not only the imitator of his virtues but also heir to them’. Mind, and character, are much in evidence in these two books: a substantial, scholarly, but ...”

“... Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using ...”

“... to the modern world as China and India, has implications for how we see American literature. Henry James may have lamented the social thinness of American history, and its apparent inability to generate great writing, but Stein’s formulation makes James look like an incorrigible 19th-century Europhile who failed to recognise that history specifically ...”

“... the Hawthornden of William Drummond; the Dublin of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in Edinburgh in ...”

“... political power, and is the more glaring when the form that power takes is force majeure. Contra Thomas Nagel and other US liberals, leaders who can segue fluently from blowjob to prayer-breakfast should give us pause for thought. The gospelling blag takes a darker turn in ‘the new military humanism’ or, in other words, killing people as an act of ...”

“... from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth ...”

“... of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by ...”

“... In the post-war world it did not start like that, although appearances were unpromising. When Henry Truman became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as ...”

“... give her a basic understanding of anatomy. Aged sixteen, she left the job to marry a tailor called Henry Sommers. He turned out to be an alcoholic, and to compensate for what she called his ‘dissipation and idleness’, she taught herself how to do his tailoring work. The hand-eye co-ordination required would also have been of use to her in the abortion ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... of 1972, which seemed to end capital punishment for good. In fact, it did nothing of the sort. Henry Furman was a slightly retarded black man who had shot and killed a householder through a closed door in the course of a burglary and was now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a ...”

“... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...”