“... an old friend of Derrida’s, and an outstanding example of the philosopher-as-stranger. He was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania in 1905 and grew up speaking Russian and Lithuanian; he then learned German and biblical Hebrew, and after a few years in Ukraine added French to his repertoire, took a degree in philosophy at the University of ...”

“... adrenal hormones in utero. One of the many consequences of this is that genetic (XX) females are born with ambiguous genitals, sometimes including a miniature penis and scrotum (genetic – XY – boys born with the condition have enlarged penises and reach puberty prematurely). The medical world regards the condition as a ...”

“... tease. Vasari’s ‘Monna Lisa’ certainly existed. She was Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini, born in Florence on 15 June 1479. She married Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo in 1495, at the age of 16; he was a well-to-do businessman in his mid-thirties, already twice widowed. By 1503, the presumed earliest date for the portrait, she had borne two ...”

“... out of Heathcliff. The Brontës’ father, Patrick, had pulled off the trick rather better. Born Patrick Brunty into a poor peasant family in County Down (still ‘Brontë country’ for the Irish today), he Frenchified his surname and made it to Cambridge, right-wing Toryism and a Yorkshire parsonage. But the Brontës’ Englishness never entirely ...”

“... wanteth number, case, that tense and gender.If​ you think you know what the 17th-century poet Anne Southwell means by referring to Minerva’s owl, you are probably wrong. Southwell is alluding to Ovid’s story of a jealous crow, who worries that the owl has usurped his position as Minerva’s favourite. The owl is Nyctimene, a princess who was raped by ...”

“... 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 ...”