“... of lemon juice and semen as secret inks, with talcum powder or perfume as fixatives. The Swedish-born Eva de Bournonville was found to have in her possession cakes of soap containing potassium ferrocyanide for invisible writing: she served six years in Holloway. The war was the making of MI5, which busied itself compiling a long register of aliens and ...”

“... Popa. He was both the product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world. Popa was born in 1922 in an area north of Belgrade called Banat, where the population was a mixture of Serbs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians. His father was a record clerk and afterwards worked for a bank; his mother was a housewife. He went to school in the ...”

“... own changes of mind: ‘I want to show my humours as they develop, revealing each element as it is born.’ He speculates on whether he is playing with his cat, or she is playing with him. In ‘On the Lame’, he engages in some unhealthily extended musing on how he came to believe that cripples are better sexual partners than anyone else (he cites the ...”

“... it is too risky.’ He decides he is not going to tell his editor anything about it. Buzzati was born in northern Italy in 1906. He was a painter and poet as well as a journalist and fiction writer. He worked for Corriere della Sera from 1928 until he died. He liked to compare his long spell at the paper with his (or anyone’s) service in the army, but the ...”

“... Ehrenburg’s immense power to pull the strings of cultural life had devolved on his French-born secretary, Natalya Stolyarova. She had become the facilitator, the person to see for appointments, assurance that this or that coast was clear, permission to read this and that, and so on. Nothing is so striking about Ehrenburg’s identification with the ...”

“... Jesus ‘spiritually in a chaste and virginal body’. The German Dominican nun Christina Ebner, born in 1277, dreamed she was pregnant with Jesus, and that she held his baby form in her arms. Sometimes Mary allowed these lonely women to nurse her child, filling their virginal bodies with the satisfaction of the breast-feeding mother. In the 14th century, St ...”

“... of nearly a century of hindsight to the idea of frock consciousness, an idea that I think was not born but at least much heightened in that period between the world wars just as Woolf was trying to put her finger on it. If human character did, as she famously suggested, change in or about 1910, women’s clothes changed very soon afterwards. Another product ...”

“... explain the near-obsession with the war among writers who were children at the time, or not even born. Richler prints a vivid – and typically too-brief – extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and ...”

“... has produced a book that artfully blends cloak-and-dagger with apologia. The future spymaster, born during the inflation of 1923, was brought up in a leftwing family. His Jewish father was a doctor and radical playwright who believed in vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, free love and Communism. Markus and his brother Konrad were educated at a ...”

“... Wyld, were part of a fleet of drivers assembled by Lily de Gramont. Dolly Wilde joined them. Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, started the ‘heiress corps’ with her partner, Anne Murray Dike. For many, it was liberating. Women referred to one another by their surnames, as if they were soldiers or schoolboys, or ...”

“... bizarre legislative expressions of Protestant paranoia) own a horse worth more than £5.Pope was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which for Catholics was rather less glorious than it was to their Protestant countrymen. Despite his size, his religion, and the sinister nominative determinism of his name, he managed while still in his twenties ...”

“... wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard ...”

“... them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the early part of Anne Sebba’s new biography concerns Ethel’s love of Yiddish theatre and her own theatrical ambitions. She was named ‘class actress’ in a high school that produced Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Zero Mostel and ...”

“... Menocchio extracted the view that there were good men in all religions: but ‘since I was born a Christian I want to remain a Christian, and if I had been born a Turk I would want to live like a Turk.’ From the rather surprising source of Boccaccio’s Decameron Menocchio drew the conclusion that ‘each person ...”

“... The last occasion on which the crown refused its assent to legislation had been in 1708 when Queen Anne rejected the Scottish Militia Bill. Without a veto, monarchy was a cipher, and could not claim co-ordinate authority with the other branches – Lords and Commons – of a notionally tripartite constitution. However, under the convenient veil of a notional ...”