“... parish of Ennismolach, as his father was before him. Named for the great Protestant patriot Henry Grattan, the orator and constitutionalist of the Anglo-Irish Parliament of 1782-1800, Fitzmaurice upholds a tradition both proudly Protestant and definitely Irish. Yet his parish has dwindled almost to nothing in the decades since Independence. ‘You ...”

“... Master George’s ‘progress in learning I can scarcely say too little’. His father, George Henry Moore, a successful racehorse owner and politician, was convinced his eldest son was a dunce and took the time-honoured step of attempting to browbeat him into an Army career. Moore junior balked at the discipline of military training college and was ...”

“... murders Jos Sedley in the final chapter of Vanity Fair, but her guilt is strongly implied. Is Henry James’s nameless governess in The Turn of the Screw a heroic and blameless victim of evil, or a deranged child-killer? In denying us certainty, James trades on the ambiguities inherent in her profession. Sheridan ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is pretty ...”

“... Fortunately, the US did better, but not without conflict. In mid-1944 the Treasury, under Henry Morgenthau Jr, carried the executive solution favoured by the British to its monstrous limit. Germany was to be declared a criminal nation, and crippled by destroying her heavy industries. Its leaders, since proving them individually guilty would be ...”

“... While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global South – countries such as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sound very funny today: ‘Happy birthday, Tu Yu’ etc.) His new lodestars were Proust and Henry Green. In the month after he graduated, the New Yorker accepted a handful of his light verse as well as a short story, and offered him a job on his return from England. He spent 19 months reporting Talk of the Town pieces, then quit the city, with Mary and ...”

“... life, anarchism is not merely true, but a truism. After all, the likes of Saddam Hussein and Henry Kissinger aren’t the likeliest incarnations of Kant’s ‘moral politician’. These grotesques manifest what in private life would amount to a criminal tendency. And given the less than intergalactic psychic distance between political and random ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain the ...”

“... the chaos and incompetence of planning.Another visitor, an Irishman of English parentage called Henry Piers, helps us to locate the creative forces in Roman life that made these changes possible. At Easter 1596 he joined the crowds in the Piazza Navona, watching the solemn celebrations inside and outside the church of Saint ...”

“... a grocer stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove ...”

“... to deal in headlines not footnotes, which wrecked him for some but made him a hero to me. In Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his ...”