“... died in 1958, at the age of 47), Back in the Jug Agane (1959). Unlike his 1990s successor, Harry Potter – the name of Potter’s school, ‘Hogwarts’, is surely derived from ‘The Hogwarts’, a Latin play by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus – Molesworth does not have adventures; instead he daydreams, ruminates and observes. The subtitle to Down with ...”

“... president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia ...”

“... plain to downright ugly, if you don’t count Glen Ford or Dana Andrews (who weren’t exactly Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift themselves). My generation have Cahiers du cinéma, Godard and Truffaut to thank for the earlier generation of movie stars we might have overlooked. More fundamentally, we have to thank Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who ...”

“... in Westminster Hall and claim it as his own. Richard’s empty throne stands at the heart of Paul Strohm’s fine study of the textual consequences of the Lancastrian usurpation. It is both a material presence, a space to be occupied and defended by the victorious Henry, and a permanent void, a metonym for the legitimacy that the early Lancastrian kings ...”

“... on Dicky Doyle and Edward Lear (both comic and topographic) and Ridgewell’s illustrations to Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. Later on he produced still lifes stocked with gleaming pots and pans like those in Geppetto’s gemütlich workplace in Disney’s Pinocchio. The final landscapes often look as if attuned to the lovingly ...”

“... was still using it a generation later (‘I know the art of Curlism, pretty well,’ his persona Harry Wildfire boasts), and the phenomenon still flourishes in the media today, though without the ingenious, gleeful panache of its first and greatest exponent. But you won’t find ‘Curlism’ in Johnson’s or more recent English dictionaries, including even ...”

“... in the 1990s, when my father was working shifts as a sheet-metal worker, he loved to watch Harry Enfield, particularly the characters Wayne and Waynetta Slob, classic caricatures of welfare-dependent, indolent proto-‘chavs’. A Militant activist like Jones’s father, he wouldn’t have called them ‘undeserving’, he would have called them the ...”

“... the summer of 1942, Keynes and his American counterpart, the economist and US Treasury official Harry Dexter White, traded blows over how to rewrite the monetary rules of the international economy. They made curious sparring partners: Keynes, the world-famous economist and public intellectual, pitted against White, an obscure technocrat and late-blooming ...”

“... ethos of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was ...”

“... culture, the complexities of the international situation. Thanks to Steven Gunn, Sean Cunningham, Paul Cavill and one or two others, we are beginning to develop a convincing political narrative that joins the story of the pretenders with the innovations in government, their domestic reception and the larger diplomatic and economic environment. But as late as ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... by his patron. After five years he went back to Munich. The wealthy cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler moved to Weimar in the opening years of the 20th century. A patron of the avant-garde and an enthusiast for the Ballets Russes, he was friends with Rodin and collected works by Cézanne and Van Gogh. He got on well with the new young Grand Duke ...”

“... Hospital, a school in West Sussex with its own railway station. But he himself was sent to St Paul’s in London, where as a 15-year-old recruit to the Officers’ Training Corps he lost a leg in a camping accident. His subsequent failure to pass the School Certificate exams ended his hopes of taking up a traffic apprenticeship with the Southern ...”

“... Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five stories about Princes William and Harry in 2005 and 2006 for around £1000. The arrests of journalists began on 4 November 2011 with Jamie Pyatt, a prolific reporter for the Sun. On 28 January 2012, detectives arrested the Sun’s executive editor, Fergus Shanahan, its managing editor, Graham ...”