“... intangible feminine principle. True, a similar principle was being evoked in the early Thirties by John Cowper Powys, when he commended Dorothy Richardson for having dredged up her novels ‘out of the abyss of feminine consciousness’; and there’s Virginia Woolf’s famous comment on the same set of novels, when she noted their author’s mastery over what ...”

“... consideration of the ethnographic evidence, for which Scruton depends, quaintly, on Havelock Ellis. A proper examination of the growing body of anthropological work in this area might confirm some aspects of his thesis – that there can be no sexuality without anxiety, for instance. But it would cast doubt on the contention that a single exclusive form ...”

“... Sir William Osler, who compiled his own dossier on Barry, as well as the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who included Barry in his roster of distinguished instances of transvestism. Barry served the British army as a surgeon for 45 years, rising to the position of inspector general of hospitals, the medical man’s equivalent to brigadier general. Only after ...”

“... obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the portrait of Moore by John Butler Yeats, reproduced in Gray’s book. There sits a harmless, walrus-moustached gentleman of 53, a little melancholy in expression, but by no means satyr-like, fresh-from-the-womb or squiffy. The year of the portrait was 1905, when Moore, surprisingly ...”

“... from a married police detective to a black teenage student writing a story about the serial-killer John Wayne Gacy. This is a woman who chooses to live dangerously. In every respect – her sexual aggression, her intellectual interests, her liberated lifestyle and her feminist leanings – Frannie is the kind of transgressive woman who gets singled out for ...”

“... the early work of Browning and Tennyson within the ‘two systems of concentric circles’, as John Stuart Mill described them, that radiated out from the radical Bentham and the conservative Coleridge. While Browning wrote for the Monthly Repository, edited by the Benthamite W.J. Fox, the young Tennyson associated with Arthur Hallam and the conservative ...”

“... sexuality: sadism, masochism, fetishism, ‘antipathetic sexual instinct’) and Havelock Ellis, whose study Sexual Inversion was published in 1897 and banned in England after the Wilde trial. Unable to decide whether they should blame McCormick or his cool, mannish wife, his doctors confidently advise a variety of vastly expensive, increasingly ...”

“... captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... and wondrous happenings from natural disasters to sea monster sightings. In London in the 1580s, John Wolfe, a printer trained in Florence, pumped out slim translations of Continental news. Newspapers weren’t needed for news from the Battle of Lepanto to cascade across Europe in 1571, with three hundred pamphlets and broadsides printed from Naples to ...”

“... without it. Some thought it was the hallmark of genius, a view obstinately perpetuated by Havelock Ellis. In short, it was an honour to have gout and the phrase ‘the honour of the gout’ was in free use. The authors quote Earl Nugent’s apology to the Duke of Newcastle for failing to wait on him: ‘He received the Honor of His Grace’s card here, where ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... them, it could mind them.’Feeney balances this material against evasion and omission – the John McGahern and Anne Enright school of hiding trauma in narrative cracks. As You Were is haunted by the abuses of women in recent Irish history. Between 1925 and 1961 a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children operated in Tuam, a large town in ...”