“... their confident prescriptions for dealing with the gays. These range from impossible cures to savage punishments – imprisonment, flogging, castration, deportation. For this seventy-year-old gay English reader, Parker (who’s the same age as me) has clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to ...”

“... sent copies of poems they had been working on to famous poets, including the poet laureate Robert Southey. We don’t have Charlotte’s letter to Southey, or know which poems she sent, but parts of her letter are quoted in his and show her extravagant style of praise – she begs him to ‘stoop from his throne of light and glory’ – which he ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”

“... and Kerr-Bell suggest, however, that the TMO became more intermeshed with the council under Robert Black, who was chief executive at the time of the refurbishment. ‘He instilled a culture where you couldn’t complain,’ I was told. I contacted Black, trying to get him to respond to this allegation, but he preferred not to. The Grenfell Action ...”

“... Georgia when the Soviet Union broke up; a Georgian punitive invasion in 1993 provoked a savage war that ended in Abkhaz victory and the flight or expulsion of the Georgian population. Transnistria, with just under half a million people, is a strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine: its people are mostly Russian or Ukrainian speakers, who fought a ...”

“... Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the five years before Bell got going on the Clyde half a dozen other steamers had begun to carry freight and passengers on the Delaware, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi and ...”