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“... revive his reputation as a writer. There is no dearth of gossip and scandal in Fierce Communion, Helena Wall’s study of the relations between family and community in early America. Like Staves, Wall writes at the intersection of legal and social history, but her book does not so much attempt to criticise the ...”

“... bedsheets when he was ill with malaria, and a laundress who spied on him through a crack in a St Helena bath-house wall. According to an officer who encountered Barry in Trinidad, ‘the impression and general belief were that he was a hermaphrodite, and as such he escaped much comment or observation in places where every ...”

“... dead, and the murderer the obvious suspect, John (or, to Edwin, Jack) Jasper. Something is made of Helena Landless’s aptitude for dressing up and something of ‘that great black scarf’ which, as Dickens’s Jasper pulls it off and loops it round his arm, makes his face ‘knitted and stern’. Mr Garfield invents an amusingly lightweight Datchery, who is ...”

“... Arden, one of the world’s richest women, lined the inside of her shoes with newspaper, or that Helena Rubinstein’s lawyer chose ‘the budget option’ at the funeral parlour after her death until wiser counsel prevailed, or that Diana Vreeland’s hair was so hard that once, when her maid bumped into it with a tray, ‘it clinked.’ 1905 was the year ...”

“... a marriage in crisis: Jimmy mistreats his pregnant wife, Alison, who is encouraged by her friend, Helena, to leave him; once Alison is gone, Helena and Jimmy have an affair, until Alison returns (having lost her baby) and the couple are reconciled. Jimmy’s friend, Cliff, and Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, make up the ...”

“... Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket gulping, hands feebly gripping, his head bent towards the ground, where 13 broken bodies already ...”

“... exclusive to the global North: Morocco has constructed its own highly militarised, 1700-mile-long wall across Western Sahara. In April 2021, Brahim Ghali, leader of the Western Sahara independence movement, flew to Spain to receive medical treatment for Covid. A diplomatic crisis ensued. Morocco withdrew its ambassador and, a few weeks later, made clear its ...”

“... Although the third journal, which describes her life as a teacher of contraband ex-slaves in St Helena, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands, is extremely interesting and lively, it also reveals the extent of her unconscious prejudice against the culture of non-assimilated black America. Six couples were married today – Only one had the slightest claim ...”

“... and read such lurid accounts. Off they went, gentry and servants: ‘Lord and Lady Mount Cashell, Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William ...”

“... her finger on why Elie Nadelman’s entire 1911 exhibition in London should have been bought up by Helena Rubenstein, who used the pieces to publicise her cosmetics, while Brancusi’s effigy (along with those of Matisse and the critic Walter Pach) was burnt by outraged traditionalists when the Armory Show went to Chicago in 1913, and in so doing elaborates ...”

“... on. He had already worked in London, in 1926, designing a radical glass and steel frontage for Helena Rubinstein’s salon in Mayfair. His first completed building after the move was a small, single-storey house at Broxted in Essex (surprisingly not mentioned by Pevsner in his Buildings of England but noted in the Essex Shell Guide). Although the ...”

“... to memory – without even knowing I was doing so – was incised in large Roman capitals on a wall of the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley, South Africa. During the Anglo-Boer War, Kimberley was besieged for some months by forces from the two Boer republics, the Transvaal (De Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) and the Orange Free State. Among those trapped ...”

“... Wildly excited at the thought that the Boers might at last have created the vital crack in the wall of the British Empire, Nicholas rushed off to see the Kaiser – ‘I intend to set the Emperor on the British, reminding him of his famous telegram to Kruger!’ – while the Russian Foreign Minister tried to interest the French in an anti-British ...”

“... Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a comic book of the filmscript of Syberberg’s Hitler, or a bag of (used) truncheons for sale. Once ensconced in the plane, a smiling hostess hands one a copy of Esquire for April ...”

“... in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should ...”