“... pointed to a line of postcards featuring Seamus. He tutted. I took one down, a portrait painted by Edward McGuire in 1974. It showed a sullen, tousle-haired graduate of the bog. Karl immediately plucked a postcard from the display and presented it to our faces. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘They have one of me, too.’ It was a portrait of a terrifically wizen-faced ...”

“... in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the Second World War, rather than ...”

“... Henja and Rosalia, with Rosalia’s two young sons, stayed in Holland; Zofia took the eldest son, Edward, to Copenhagen (why exchange neutral Holland for neutral Denmark?), while Bernard managed to take Joe and another sister, Madzja, to London where they were all registered under the Aliens Restriction Order. Joe, now 21, enrolled to study geology as a ...”

“... academy. He wanted to drift and burrow in a city that seemed ‘more like home’ to him than Berlin – the phrase crops up in a letter from 1913 – but at the same time deeply strange, deeply alien. Mostly he would pass the day in libraries or read feverishly in his room far into the night – The Arcades Project is testimony to his being incurably un ...”

“... novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as ...”

“... Madrid’s hold on the territory had been formalised during the colonial carve-up of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, long before the Moroccan protectorate system came into force. By the late 1950s, ALN fighters were active on both sides of the Moroccan/Spanish border in a bid to drive Spain from its remaining enclaves in newly independent Morocco ...”

“... the origins of the word to the German word Reprivatisierung, first used in English in 1936 by the Berlin correspondent of the Economist, writing about Nazi economic policy. In 1943, in an analysis of Hitler’s programme in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the word ‘privatisation’ entered the academic literature for the first time. The author, Sidney ...”

“... birth. I can remember almost nothing of the house we’d lived in previously, which was at 39 King Edward’s Road, Hackney. I know from a photograph that it was a large, dark, Victorian house, but when I went to take a look at it around 1950 I discovered that it had been destroyed in the Blitz. The other thing I know about it from photographs is that it had a ...”