“... was Ion Antonescu, a career general who forced the king to abdicate in favour of 18-year-old Michael on the evening of 5 September 1940. The coup granted Carol Hohenzollern the distinction of being the only European sovereign to lose his throne twice to his son. ‘King Carol Goes Again’ was the headline in the Times.He left on a train before dawn the ...”

“... left Romania for exile in Paris. As a result, when King Ferdinand died two years later, it was Michael, Carol’s five-year-old son by Princess Helen, who was crowned under a regency. Three years later, the boy king was unseated in a quiet coup by his father, who flew into Bucharest under cover of night (Lupescu followed later). Carol had chosen his moment ...”

“... introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a loop: ‘a three-hour film about a landscape with stones, blue and grey, and all the possible camera movements over this landscape … I have never been so moved, so ...”

“... and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the evening service, Charlotte Brontë did something strange and entirely uncharacteristic: she followed the worshippers in.’Charlotte wrote to Emily of that ...”

“... of the word ‘bloody’. He then named a 23-year-old Trinity College Dublin graduate student, Michael Clear, who quickly denied it. The story went nowhere and Clear went back to his studies. Then Leah McGrath Goodman wrote a piece for Newsweek claiming Satoshi was a maths genius called Dorian Nakamoto, who lived in the Californian suburb of Temple City ...”

“... and from underneath,’ she was saying. ‘We are on the top floor; the top floor still did not burn yet. God forbid. You can see all the people who were lucky to leave.’ In that phrase, the people watching are inside the room with her, but of course they aren’t inside the room, they are seventy metres or more away, and the story of her entrapment is ...”