Helen Rappaport is a British historian, author, and former actress. As a historian, she specialises in the Victorian era and revolutionary Russia.

Born in Bromley, Rappaport grew up near the River Medway in North Kent and attended Chatham Grammar School for Girls. She studied Russian at Leeds University, where she was involved in the university theatre group and decided against a career in the Foreign Office and instead became an actress. She appeared in several television series including Crown Court, Love Hurts and The Bill. As she reveals in an interview she spent '20 years in the doldrums as an out of work, broke and miserable actress'...

In the early nineties she gave up acting and became a copy editor for academic publishers Blackwell and OUP. and also contributed to historical and biographical reference works published by for example Cassell and Readers Digest.

She became a full-time writer in 1998, writing three books for US publisher ABC-CLIO including An Encyclopaedia of Women Social Reformers in 2001, with a foreword by Marian Wright Edelman. It won an award in 2002 from the American Library Association as an Outstanding Reference Source and according to the Times Higher Educational Supplement, 'A splendid book, informative and wide-ranging'.

The word asshole, a variant of arsehole, which is still prevalent in British and Australian English, is a vulgar to describe the anus, often pejoratively used to refer to people.

The word arse in English derives from the Germanic root *arsaz, which originated from the Proto-Indo-European root *ors — meaning buttocks or backside. The combined form arsehole is first attested from 1500 in its literal use to refer to the anus. The metaphorical use of the word to refer to the worst place in a region, e.g., "the arsehole of the world") is first attested in print in 1865; the use to refer to a contemptible person is first attested in 1933. In the ninth chapter of his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, Richard Wright quotes a snippet of verse that uses the term: "All these white folks dressed so fine / Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...". Its first appearance as an insult term in a newspaper indexed by Google News is in 1965. As with other vulgarities, these uses of the word may have been common in oral speech for some time before their first print appearances. By the 1970s, Hustler magazine featured people they did not like as "Asshole of the Month." In 1972, Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers recorded his song "Pablo Picasso," which includes the line "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole."

Christopher Potter (1591–1646) was an English academic and clergyman, Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford, controversialist and prominent supporter of William Laud.

He was born in Westmoreland, the nephew of Barnaby Potter. He matriculated at Queen's on 11 July 1606, aged 15, having entered the college in the previous Easter term. He was elected taberdar (pauper puer) on 29 October 1609. He graduated B.A. on 30 April 1610 and M.A. on 8 July 1613, became chaplain on 5 July 1613, and fellow on 22 March 1614-15. He was magister puerorum in 1620, and senior bursar in 1622; graduated B.D. and received a preacher's license on 9 March 1621, and proceeded D.D. on 17 February 1627.

He was in early life a follower of Henry Airay, opponent of Laud, and held a lectureship at Abingdon where he was a popular preacher. On his uncle's resignation of the headship of Queen's (17 June 1626), he was elected Provost. He now attached himself to Laud, and was made chaplain in ordinary to Charles I. In the first year of his provostship, with the assistance of Sir Thomas Coventry, Viscount Doncaster, and Sir George Goring, vice-chamberlain to Queen Henrietta Maria, he obtained the advowson of three rectories and three vicarages in Hampshire for the college. He himself received the rectory of Strathfieldsaye in 1627, and after the death of William Cox in 1632 was made precentor of Chichester. He received the rectory of Bletchington, Oxfordshire, in 1631.