Horace Slughorn

Horace Slughorn enters Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince disguised as an armchair, from which Albus Dumbledore politely extracts him. A colleague of Dumbledore's from decades of teaching at Hogwarts, Slughorn has been living in comfortable retirement, moving from one borrowed house to another, and it takes a careful campaign of flattery and reassurance to coax him back onto the school staff. He is a rounded, velvet-jacketed connoisseur of comfort with a great walrus moustache and an encyclopaedic memory for people, and his signature habit follows him back to the castle: collecting students. Those with talent, connections, or promising names find themselves invited to his suppers, a circle known as the Slug Club, curated by a man who likes to be a well-placed friend to the well-placed.