“... while Amys’s wife looks on approvingly (‘We can always produce more kids’). The minute Edward II set eyes on Piers Gaveston (probably in 1297), the Cottonian chronicle says, ‘he bombarded (?) him with love (amorem) to the extent that he entered into a covenant of brotherhood (fraternitatis fedus) with him. He chose with steadfast determination to ...”

“... Anglia and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when King Alfred is supposed to have burnt the cakes – but on reflection one wonders whether it ...”

“... lack of grammar and inconsequence’ – comments unlikely to endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect ...”

“... people are not strictly necessary, though they are often the ones that get read. A good life of Edward Garnett, on the other hand, might, since his is a known but hardly a famous name, fail to attract much attention. But everybody who has an interest in 20th-century English fiction should read Mr Jefferson’s book. It is sometimes a bit dull and ...”

“... and her political and dynastic connections. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke, had been tutor to Edward VI; her eldest sister, Mildred, was married to the all-powerful Lord Treasurer, Burghley; another sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir ...”

“... his king. Having been cooped up for the entirety of his short life by his controlling father, the young Henry – ‘rich, savage and thirsting for glory’, according to Machiavelli – was desperate to make his mark, and there was no better way to do so than by attempting to ‘recover his right’ from England’s ancient enemy: he was sabre-rattling ...”

“... was an established national fact, but still decidedly modern, often with racy connotations. When Edward Prince of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for ...”

“... racecourse and the music halls. The diminutive Harry Relph began his career in blackface, as ‘Young Tichborne, the Claimant’s Bootlace’, soon to be abbreviated and immortalised as Little Tich, whence ‘tich’ and ‘tichy’ – a delicious way to remember the gargantuan Claimant. Those who took a class-based view of things were bewildered and ...”

“... the Occupied Territories was to challenge the collective Arab narrative and, in the words of a young Arab Third Secretary, to view history in too ‘liberal and Western’ a way. Thus no Palestinian narrative, no Profile, no census: Palestine yes, Palestinians no. The second anecdote is taken from the other side of the aisle, where, as we have seen, things ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... that follows her suicide in the spring of 1898. It then goes back to trace the love-affair with Edward Aveling that was eventually to precipitate her death. They are both active socialists, in the thick of public controversy. Aveling is something between a dilettante and a man of parts – at first a lecturer in science, later a playwright and actor. Tussy ...”

“... and Lowes Dickinson, he was passionately open to influences, as to the winds that blow. In 1886, Edward Carpenter came on a visit, and ‘after supper we had a delightful walk through the green cornfields in the afterglow. He unfolded to me a wonderful idea of his of a new freemasonry, a comradeship in the life of men which might be based on our little ...”

“... which has recently come to light, and yet much of Lizzie’s pathos is there. She had to be young, as the other Stunners were, she had to have a child (in her last few months she tried to adopt an eight-year-old) – just as she had to paint spectral watercolours and write verses, as Gabriel did. And yet she had character. In her rickety leanness, her ...”

“... In​  The Waste Land, a ‘young man carbuncular’ makes a play for ‘the typist home at teatime’: Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference.Anyone who wants the typist’s side of this brief, bleak encounter might find a version of it in Rosemary Tonks’s poems, with their undertow of sexual menace and carnal scavenging ...”

“... stuff. Some of the men who incited the riots in Notting Hill in 1958 were placed in them – those young white men known as Teddy Boys. The riots were the inspiration for Oswald Mosley to run as a candidate for North Kensington in the 1959 general election, and he spoke during the campaign about the repatriation of the West Indians living in Notting Hill. He ...”