“... For every Oscar Wilde, there were the 27 mostly anonymous men questioned in the early 1890s for John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, who with delightful candour describe early experiences, favourite sexual positions and relationships past and present, the great majority of them expressing an easy acceptance of their ...”

“... cross continents or span centuries, but records one year – 1982 – in the life of Jason Taylor. Jason lives with his parents and older sister at No. 9 (of course) Kingfisher Meadows: they moved to the village soon after Jason was born and, like other recent arrivals, are quietly resented by the locals. His sister, Julia, is in her last year at ...”

“... eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences and using no, like, you know, ‘discourse markers’. Although born and raised in ...”

“... who weighed only 15 pounds. It had been the idea of the Victorian freak show impresario Phineas Taylor Barnum to present him in the guise of ‘General Tom Thumb’. Before long, the general’s imitations – ‘in full military costume’ – of Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick the Great, and a varied repertoire including a ‘Scotch song’ and a ...”

“... opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was ...”

“... is demonstrated by a range of imitations and borrowings made by other dramatists, among them John Marston, Thomas Middleton (most spectacularly in The Revenger’s Tragedy, 1606) and John Fletcher. In his Jew’s Tragedy, written in the 1620s, William Heminges even includes the line ‘To be, or not to be, I, there’s ...”

“... of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late John Roberts, himself a pioneering exponent of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... the other night, where were Tennyson, Browning, Anthony Trollope, Lord Houghton, Lord Stanley, Tom Taylor, Fitzjames Stephen ... with all of whom I had a pleasant gossip.’ With all of them? But even on such a loquacious evening he still spared a thought for ‘how much better worthy of such company dear Daniel would have been.’ His own receptions, held ...”

“... throughout a shimmering and ravishing soundscape of layered sampling and electronics created by John Gosling (aka Mekon). Bolton avoids the term ‘gothic’, but it haunts the show. Alexander McQueen has entered that part of the afterlife where Marilyn and Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Peaches Geldof are ...”

“... would be prime minister and football would reclaim its place at the centre of national life. Then John Major won, and two months later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page with a turnip for a head. In 1994 England failed to qualify for the World ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... of silver greatly benefited the East India Company. The silver trade through Dover was also, as Mr Taylor and Mr Kepler have shown, of vital importance for the reexport business: this brought a new height of prosperity to the Levant traders and others in the 1630s. The Goa treaty with Portugal in 1635 primarily benefited the East India Company. Not only did it ...”

“... had the opportunity to go into hiding or, if they had the connections, to flee abroad. Rowland Taylor was a friend of Cranmer and was married to William Tyndale’s niece. Arrested, released, arrested, he had plenty of chances to keep clear of the authorities, but ‘Verbum Dei made us goo to London.’ He was burned on the same day as Bishop Hooper, who ...”