“... 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 ...”

“... boundaries came into existence, to reinforce the physical ones – the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ town – that were already there. The social and racial structure of the India Kipling was born in and later returned to as a journalist was determined by the Mutiny and, later, by the defeat of the Ilbert Bill, which would have given Indian magistrates ...”

“... names, just as the middle classes in England at the end of the 20th century turned to Jack, Harry, Max and Ben. Whatever his real name, the fact that scholars in the Hellenistic period found it unbelievable that the great philosopher could be a ‘Plato’ – they preferred that his real name be Aristocles, ‘Famed for Excellence’, after his grandfather ...”

“... all of them documented. The level of detail we have is astonishing. My maternal grandfather, Max Weinberg, was sent to Theresienstadt in Bohemia from Frankfurt am Main on 15 May 1942, two weeks before his 73rd birthday, on Transport XII/3, Train Da 515. He was prisoner 1307. He must have been one of the few Jews left in Germany. Two and a half years ...”