Using the index

• What were the dates of Pitt the Elder and Pitt the Younger?

• Was Pocahontas a real person?

• When did King Offa die?

• And when did Labour leader John Smith die?

• Was that surname Philips, Phillips, or Phillipps?

• Davies or Davis, Gray or Grey, Thompson or Thomson?

• … Mc or Mac?

• How should I refer to St Thomas of Canterbury?

• What was the middle name of W. S. Gilbert? Jerome K. Jerome? Rupert Brooke? T. S. Eliot?

• Did you mean Robert Devereux the second earl of Essex, or the third earl of Essex?

• Is J. E. Powell the same person as Enoch Powell?

• Who was earlier, Chaucer or Langland?

• … or Thomas Tallis, the composer, or John Napier, the mathematician?

• What was the real forename of Beau Brummel? Or of Capability Brown?

• Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold, or another Thomas Arnold?

• And which William Smith?

• Ann of Cleeves or Anne of Cleves?

• Elisabeth Frink, not Elizabeth Frink

• Palmerston, the prime minister – what was his name?

• Who was the Swan of Lichfield?

• … Bess of Hardwick? Madame Tussaud?

• Let us guide you: Cnut not Canute; Æthelred not Ethelred.

• When might St George have lived?

• How old was Samuel Beckett when Thomas Hardy died?

• The original Boycott; the original Rachman