“... some unforgettable incidents in this collection: when the raffish Wasp viciously pulls rank on the black pianist; when the strange, lonely little boy rewards his teacher’s kindness by drawing an obscene caricature of her on the wall; when the girl from the typing pool sees that her impending marriage will be a passionless compromise; when the alcoholic ...”

“... first half of the 20th century. Unlike the ‘Phage Church’ established by the German emigré Max Delbrück in the US in the 1940s – which aimed to do genetics with very rapidly growing bacterial viruses (bacteriophages or ‘phages’) in order to determine the nature of the gene – the biometrical/statistical school focused on how genes behaved and ...”

“... 1940s (John Huston, not Hitchcock and Hawks) and ‘natural’ foreign directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls and Vittorio de Sica. In 1967, she lamented the frustrated career of Orson Welles, someone who could ‘unify’ educated and uneducated audiences – the quality that makes movies ‘a great popular art form’.If I felt that Kael was addressing my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... March 1905 to Annalen der Physik, the leading German-language journal of physics, whose editor was Max Planck. It is a remarkably self-assured piece of work, and Einstein was fully conscious of its importance. ‘The paper deals with radiation and the energy properties of light,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘and is very revolutionary.’ In it he attempts to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”