“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sturdily built handsome man with brilliantly white wavy hair, a girlishly clear complexion, a black moustache, and tender mocking eyes’ sat quietly working on some ambitious piece of knitting or embroidery. Though men seem to have knitted more in those days, one friend at least felt it necessary to insist that there was ‘nothing effeminate about his ...”

“... appeared in the papers perched imperiously on a chair made to look like an inverted, near-naked black woman, an image published on Martin Luther King Day. Abramovich, with his dislike of unnecessary publicity, was not amused. In the Branson household, it’s the man himself who can be relied on to do this sort of thing. The photo on the back of Bower’s ...”

“... He had told the story to his new heart doctor earlier that day, who said it was a myth even then. Black’s Medical Dictionary was now no longer the volume much consulted over breakfast that it had once been. He owned two editions – the 28th (1968) and the 40th (2002). In the first, a stroke is defined as ‘a popular name for apoplexy ...”

“... insisted he was only an amateur among real botanists), and a surrealist collage in the manner of Max Ernst. In various thumbnail sketches of himself taken from different angles during early London life, Brooke sardonically presents a typical young intellectual of the period, toying rather ineffectively with the arts, writing poetry intermittently, trying to ...”

“... and genres.’ He must have thought this would be hard to beat. But he hadn’t reckoned on Max Porter, who declares it ‘a masterpiece … a staggeringly beautiful book’, and what’s more, a ‘huge gift to the world’.Then you read the book and are confronted with such lines as ‘a bullet without a body is a song without ears.’ Or: ‘The most ...”

“... in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted her to help him escape through Spain. Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not, but it includes the most recent of many last words about ...”