“... Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest If everyone says Tom did it when the man who did it was Will, the result is what one calls an error, and Will is done out of his due. If while everyone says Tom did it you see Will and hail him as Tom, error ...”

“... middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and ...”

“... in Elizabethan England. Certainly, the link is made in Charles I’s reign by a writer called Henry Blount, whom James Shapiro quotes in Shakespeare and the Jews. In A Voyage into the Levant, Blount likens Jews to radical English Puritans, saying that Jews have ‘light, aerial and fanatical brains, spirited much like our hot apocalypse men’. Eliot’s ...”

“... war studies department, where he is professor of history and foreign policy (he used to hold the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress), and foreign policy adviser to both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; this month he was commissioned to lead yet another defence policy review. In 2016, Bew published a ...”

“... an unhealthy degree of co-dependency between politicians and journalists. When the sketch-writer Henry Lucy first joined the parliamentary corps of the Daily News in the late 1860s, the ‘authorities … regard[ed] the Press as an intruder’. When, around the same time, Wemyss Reid, later editor of the Leeds Mercury, joined the press gallery he discovered ...”

“... Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. Drawing on the arrow shower in Olivier’s film of Henry V, Larkin communicates both disappointment – the ‘sense of falling’ – and a swelling sense of fertility and alert purpose, with more than a hint of tears. Nothing in these letters shows this feeling, and that is what is so mysterious about ...”

“... Offences against the Person Act, itself bundled with six other bills. The same thing happened when Henry Labouchère introduced a clause into the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 replacing ‘attempted sodomy’ or ‘unnatural assault’ with the new offence of ‘gross indecency’, with which Wilde was later charged (Upchurch points out that, contrary to ...”

“... new Glasgow writing’, a movement taken to involve man of pairts Alasdair Gray and poet Tom Leonard as well as Kelman and Galloway, to open on a sort of pen-Polaroid of the city of Glasgow itself. But nothing could be more inappropriate to the spirit of the writing. Turn to the stories collected in The Burn and in Blood: a powerful sense of locality ...”

“... him pushed him out of his Tory imperialism towards a form of socialism. Together with his brother Tom, he joined the Fabian Society in October 1907; then in January 1908 – a much more crucial step – he joined the Stepney ILP. The 16 branch members were all trade-unionists, so Attlee himself joined the National Union of Clerks. For seven years, up to the ...”

“... been the quickest route for expatriates like Wilde, Wittgenstein, Ernest Gellner, Isaiah Berlin or Tom Stoppard to become English. In doing so, they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats, superior to the very middle classes who have marginalised them. In modern England, the patrician is an idiosyncratic, déclassé figure ...”

“... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the ...”

“... to work on – especially because he can’t remember what Big Mal so cryptically said. Next comes Henry England, a.k.a. Hal Nine (aristocracy). Henry is ‘in a ridiculous situation’: he is King of England. More precisely, he is Henry IX. (We are in a parallel universe. And perhaps, in ...”

“... streets or travel on the highways. It was in the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession that Henry Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate as well as a novelist and playwright, began forming the force that would come to be known by the unofficial title of the Bow Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law ...”

“... room they’d had last year. The day nursery, which was large, could just about take Teddy, Simon, Henry and Tom.’ There’s even more of this in All Change than in previous instalments. How can Polly (Hugh’s daughter) and her husband, Gerald, make the ugly old house he’s inherited into a viable business? What will ...”

“... to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards Bech the shapeless face of Vernon Klegg, the American Kafka, whose austere minimalist renderings of kitchen spats and dishevelled mobile homes were ...”