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“... ought there to be a glossary, ‘ee by gum’ or ‘eeh baah gum’? (The issues are raised by William Neill when he prints two versions of the same poem on facing pages, both in dialect but one a good deal more dialectal than the other.) Since poets are not etymologists they may play fast and loose, as MacDiarmid did when assembling some of his ...”

“... joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth.’‘I’m sorry: the twelfth ...”

“... he can be glimpsed in the glare of what was going on around him.’ In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Shapiro observed the paradox that while Shakespeare ‘more so, perhaps, than any writer before or since … held the keys that opened the hearts and minds of others’, he ‘kept a lock on what he revealed about himself’. It is as if the ...”

“... in the company. The Globe, as James Shapiro reminded us in 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), was ‘the first London theatre built by actors for actors’, but, by virtue of Shakespeare’s position there, it developed as ‘a playwright’s and not an actor’s theatre’. In it Shakespeare would enjoy the professional ...”

“... John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th century druids appeared at Stonehenge and they have been there ever since. It is often pointed ...”

“... the Irish as to a hedgehog his skin [enabling him] to live and lie out in bogs and woods’, Sir William Herbert argued that the only remedy would be to enforce a long-standing ban on native dress and drive the woodkerne from their forests. In Shakespeare’s own writing, the Irish forest and its denizens are registered only as an offstage presence – but ...”

“... a painful business.’ In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Parson Evans attempts to show off William Page’s learning to his mother; but when the boy admits he’s forgotten the declension of his pronouns, the schoolmaster at once threatens him with an educative thrashing: ‘If you forget your “qui”s, your “que”s, and your “quod”s, you must ...”

“... seruants place and dutie’ was acknowledged to be ‘of more abiect and inferiour kinde’, as William Gouge put it in Of Domesticall Duties (1622). By the mid-20th century, the material conditions of service had changed beyond recognition, yet the ideological assumptions that had governed the early modern household continued to colour the language and ...”

“... seems to have endowed the blood of all his descendants with mysterious properties, so that in 1883 William George Black recorded that Dubliners regarded Keogh blood as a proven remedy for the toothache, while an acquaintance claimed to know of a Belfast Keogh ‘whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. Black does not ...”

“... piece on Harold Macmillan, we certainly need it for the life of a lesser prime minister, Lord O’ Neill of Northern Ireland. This is the man, we are reminded, who on retirement said: ‘It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants … they will refuse to have 18 ...”

“... who rose to become an alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon. Both fathers were socially ambitious: William Middleton bought himself a coat of arms from the College of Heralds in 1568, thereby securing the all-important right for himself and his successors to style themselves ‘gentleman’ – a feat that John Shakespeare, with the help of his successful ...”

“... antecedents – Godwin, of course, Tom Paine, Francis Burdett, Cartwright and, interestingly, William Hazlitt. Throughout, Dr Dawson pays Shelley the tribute – a rare one, as it would certainly have been in the days before the pioneering work of the American scholar Kenneth Neill Cameron – of taking his politics ...”

“... permission for this and fingers those notorious reactionaries and outspoken Dyer supporters, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, then war secretary, but he can find no trace of the necessary arrangements in the papers of either ‘Jix’ or ‘Worthy’, suggesting that even they felt the need to conceal what they ...”

“... reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. Orwell discounts Jack the Ripper as an altogether special artisan of murder, but of the remaining eight, six were poisoners. The perfect murderer, he explains, was ...”

“... Streets and roads bear the names of some of the most savage grandees of the empire – Havelock, Neill, Outram. The bicentennial of 2019 celebrated the arrival of the city-state’s ‘founding father’, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, whose name graces countless schools and institutions, the famous hotel, and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without ...”