“... poetic sequence Modern Love, when she traumatised Meredith by leaving him for their artist friend Henry Wallis). Jane died in 1851, and Peacock’s record as a widower confirms the sense of desperation. The following year – emboldened at this point in his career by financial security – he proposed marriage to Claire Clairmont’s niece, a 27-year-old ...”

“... of JFK: Minute by Minute) and Emma Craigie (the author of Chocolate Cake with Hitler and King Henry VIII: The Exploding King). Strictly speaking it ought to be called ‘Hitler’s Last Two Days’, since it opens shortly after midnight on 29 April 1945: ‘Eva Braun is in her bedroom having her hair done by her maid, Liesl Ostertag. Braun keeps it ...”

“... from such stocks and occurred not in Africa, Asia or South America, but in England. In 1978 Henry Bedson was professor of medical microbiology at Birmingham University. His father, Sir Samuel, had also been a microbiologist, whose work on psittacosis had been recognised by a proposal to call the group of organisms to which it belonged Bedsonia. ...”

“... sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and compassionate, a humanist in the modern as well as the Tudor sense. It’s significant that he is a hunchback, a painful disability that affects how others see him as well as his own view of himself. He weeps ...”

“... each one in turn, drawing off the last remnants, getting his final money’s worth. The man is Henry Drax – a perfectly ordinary Yorkshire surname, from the village near Selby, now best known as the site of Britain’s largest coal-fired power station. Perhaps because of the echoes of ‘Dracula’, as well as that sinister final ‘x’, it has lent its ...”

“... At some points in the Middle Ages the ‘godfather’ system of social cohesion was the norm. Thomas Bisson, in The Crisis of the 12th Century, asks why this ceased to be the case. Bisson used to be the C.H. Haskins Professor of Medieval History at Harvard. In 1927 Haskins published an influential book called The Renaissance of the 12th Century, on which ...”

“... The​ official justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was set out by Henry Stimson, the former US secretary of war, in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. There had been ‘no other choice’, he said. Had the bombs not been dropped, a bloody invasion of Japan would have been inevitable, and might have ‘cost over a million casualties to the American forces alone ...”

“... was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that Richard was immature was made explicitly by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in the sermon he preached on Richard’s deposition in 1399. There he contrasted the ‘boy’, Richard, with his supplanter, the ‘man’, Henry IV. He also elaborated on the ...”

“... appended to his 1709 edition of the plays, was based partly on information gleaned by the actor Thomas Betterton from descendants of people who might have gossiped or drunk with Shakespeare. Rowe established many of the paradigms for later lives: he inferred the ethical characteristics of the author from his high view of the plays. Shakespeare had to be ...”

“... 1539-40, ‘the Bible appointed to the use of the churches’, famous for its title-page showing Henry VIII enthroned handing the word of God to his subjects, who are set out below, dutiful and obedient. Unencumbered by priests or pope, the king is the recipient of divine favour. Resolute in his duty to lead his people in the true religion, he is no ...”

“... full force of these unpromising circumstances. They were both children of the dynasty’s founder, Henry VII: Margaret, the subject of Linda Porter’s biography, born in 1489, and her sister Mary, seven years younger. Two later Tudor daughters escaped such a fate by becoming mistresses of their own fortunes through genealogical accident. ...”

“... There is Hilary the hard-bitten tabloid columnist. Roddy the heartless art-dealing seducer, Henry the free-market ideologue, Dorothy the profit-mad agriculturalist. As a dynasty, however, these men and women belong to another literary and temporal mode entirely – to the spoof Gothic fiction of Winshaw Towers, with its cartoon-like turrets and ...”

“... providing unimaginable riches for a lucky few, from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to William Henry Gates III.Writing about Gates in the LRB in 1999, John Lanchester described him as ‘the apotheosis of the nerd type’. No one, least of all Gates himself, has ever maintained the delusion that his nerdiness somehow makes him cool. (Fifteen or more years ...”

“... a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling Islam‘a death cult’, claiming that the EU was inspired by Hitler’s plans for Europe ...”

“... with strong smells tended to breed acceptance or even dependence. The Elizabethan entomologist Thomas Muffet (now remembered only for his daughter’s encounter with a spider) told the story of a man who used to clean privies entering an apothecary’s shop in Antwerp. He smelled the spices and promptly fainted. Fortunately, a bystander rushed ...”