“... under. The ocean seemed to shudder. When I came up again a column of smoke was rising, treacle-black, above the headland to the east.’ When she gets back to the house she finds Cahun less dismayed than she had expected. Claude was standing on the grass bank that overlooked the beach. The hose lay on the lawn behind her, water rushing from the ...”

“... riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when white mobs attacked an Anglo-Indian restaurant and a black seamen’s hostel on consecutive nights. At the end of the war, Britain was an almost exclusively white society. By 1954, the number of non-whites in the country still stood at a mere 40,000, but immigration was already a political problem. ‘There is a ...”

“... was that the epigram was not true: Palestine already had a people. On belatedly discovering this, Max Nordau, Herzl’s friend and follower, exclaimed to his leader: ‘we are committing an injustice.’ Much later Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist colonisation in the 1920s, warned ‘that Herzl’s concept of a Jewish state was only possible because he ...”

“... present in return, having made various attempts to procure acceptable underwear for her (not black! not pantaloons!) on his regiment’s first arrival in Italy, and before that in the markets of Tunis. ‘Oh! Darling, I’m afraid you will be horribly disappointed in the undies when they arrive, as they’re neither very smart nor of good material ...”

“... fantastical, Isak Dinesen-like results. (She once had her eyelids tattooed to look like blue-black eyeliner.) She is still in love – in a distant way – with George Clooney, though playing with the Paint program on her computer (adapted for low vision) and writing the news every day to her pals in the Brit Group, a gossipy little chat room for elderly ...”

“... Madame, tout de suite! The droll photograph of Colette on the jungle gym with her girlfriend ‘Max’, the portly Marquise de Belboeuf? It no longer gives me a frisson. I’m even getting a little bored by Berenice Abbott’s brilliant 1928 photos of Flanner – the androgynous New Yorker writer – in suave top hat and striped men’s pantaloons. If you ...”

“... with full academicals, lay, neatly folded, inside her suitcase. It was long and severe, of plain black georgette, wholly and unimpeachably correct. Beneath it was an evening dress for the Gaudy Dinner, of a rich petunia colour, excellently cut on restrained lines, with no unbecoming display of back or breast; it would not affront the portraits of dead ...”

“... his plans to submit a Habilitations-schrift – to the philosopher Georg Simmel in Berlin, then to Max Weber in Heidelberg – never came to anything. Amateur manager of a small privately-financed theatre where Ibsen and Strindberg had their Hungarian premières, frequent visitor to Florence and Paris, he acquired a somewhat esoteric reputation as the author ...”

“... of Lawrence’s career, though it was a successful book at the time and even won the James Tait Black Prize in 1920. Wilson herself judges it ‘both a mad and a bad book’ and, a little more appreciatively, ‘engagingly bonkers’, but she manages to write about it with infectious pleasure. Lawrence himself thought it ‘comic’ and, at least for the ...”

“... traditional oriental beauty, Yvonne was later described by her daughter as having ‘neither very black hair, nor a pale complexion, a bit like a Latino’. Chang’s father was a disaster. He developed a severe opium addiction and insisted on taking home a concubine. The couple fought from the very beginning, and Yvonne filed for divorce as soon as she saw ...”

“... Reg turns out to have been a petty criminal and would-be seducer, shunned as he tries to use his black-market chocolate to woo Lou (‘Above board, that’s my motto. I don’t believe in cheating’ is her put-down). Ethel emerges with Lou from an air-raid shelter to discover that her entire family has been wiped out by a doodlebug.In a spin-off novella ...”

“... dances, he laces into Dundy so hard she’s left unconscious on the bathroom floor with a pair of black eyes and a broken nose. Tynan didn’t mind when word got round about the fracas, she says. ‘There was always part of him that gloried in his reputation as a lady-killer, the sinful, depraved Don Juan. The mad, bad, dangerous-to-know sadist.’ I now ...”

“... and service economy. While silent locals stood with their bicycles in the rain, gleaming black BMWs swept past carrying Treuhand officials on their way to privatise or close more state factories. As in the old South, a whole ideology justifying the power structure had been switched off, and its guardians – in this case, the SED, the National ...”

“... schools and public services. Reactionary intellectuals such as Douglas Murray have identified Black feminist theories of ‘intersectionality’ as the root of the West’s current malaises. This rhetoric is far from harmless, as attested by the censorship of gender studies by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, and similar efforts by Ron ...”

“... home with his family, and Kafka, the Prague Jew who wrote in German and also lived, according to Max Brod, ‘spellbound in the family circle’ for most of his 41 years. You were born 500 miles east of Prague, 125 miles south-east of Drogobych, in Chernovtsy. Your family – prosperous, highly-assimilated, German-speaking – bore certain cultural and ...”