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“... broody, sombre Stoicism of Two Lives and a Dream is meticulously rendered in the translation by Walter Kaiser and the author. The jingling phrase ‘among his host of ghosts’ for dans la troupe de ses fantômes is the one thing that may cause a raised eyebrow or two, but even this presumably bears the stamp of Yourcenar’s authority. Marguerite ...”

“... Marguerite Yourcenar was a highly honoured French writer, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, but her mother came from the Low Countries. The mother died in 1903, eight days after the daughter’s birth: her married name was Fernande de Crayencour (from which the pen name ‘Yourcenar’ was constructed) and her maiden name was de Cartier de Marchienne ...”

“... Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Thus when she was proposed for membership of the French Academy, it was natural that some Frenchmen would make an issue of her nationality, in order to prevent a woman joining their club ...”

“... not to demand financial reparations for war damage, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which the kaiser’s government had forced the nascent Soviet government to cede huge swathes of territory to Germany, was formally repudiated. Rapallo had been backed by Wirth not least because it promised to strengthen the ties that had already formed between the Red ...”

“... true in reverse: the characters who do not have stories are also not in the running for babies. Walter desperately wants a baby, but Clarisse, his wife, won’t co-operate. ‘Nothing doing, my dear!’ she taunts, grabbing a piece of cheese and heading off into the night to observe moths. Clarisse despises Walter for not ...”

“... and a back-drop of lemon trees especially imported for the occasion. This was life imitating Sir Walter Scott, an outcrop of Romanticism and the desire of rulers to establish their legitimacy in a revolutionary age. I wish that McAleer, who races through the first two-thirds of the 19th century, had said something about this background of invented ...”

“... favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany. Wilhelm loved and admired the British and they loved the kaiser: to him, the Times said, belongs ‘the first place among all the foreign mourners’; even when relations were ‘strained’, he ‘never lost his popularity amongst us’. Four years before Armageddon the German emperor was decidedly not the antichrist ...”

“... but intellectual and cultural. The word today suggests the Bauhaus, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Walter Benjamin, the great photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar theorist Siegfried Kracauer and the artist Hannah Höch. One could as easily ...”

“... could not be secured. Haber was already on the job, becoming head of the chemistry department of Walter Rathenau’s Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (War Raw Materials Section). For this, and other reasons, he became a hero of the war effort. The most notorious of his contributions to the war – and probably the one which most engaged his enthusiasm – was poison ...”

“... of new elements heavier than uranium. In 1935, Lise Meitner, an Austrian physicist working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, persuaded her colleague Otto Hahn, a radiochemist, to join her in a further study of these ‘transuranic’ elements. They collaborated until Austria’s occupation by German troops in March 1938 robbed Lise Meitner of her ...”

“... Arriving in Johannesburg in 1941, Mandela was quickly recruited into the ANC by the remarkable Walter Sisulu, the grandfather of a whole ANC generation. Sisulu (who, at 76, is still in jail and well worth a birthday celebration or two) was the son of a white father who had quickly abandoned his mother, a black washerwoman. He had little education, and had ...”

“... reigned, the First World War decided it in favour of the latter. The king’s appeals to the kaiser and the tsar to prevent war tugged on family ties, but were scripted for him by Asquith’s government. The one time it was suggested that George had taken a lead, the palace panicked, rushing to deny that he had told a Prussian prince that Britain was ...”

“... expression: ‘eyes characteristic of people on public transport’, Camille says, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin. The customers of Viollet-le-Duc’s ‘factory’ for ‘the mass production of the medieval’ were not medieval themselves, and so there was to be no buggering of kings, and only one (faintly Goya-esque) demon snacking on human flesh. Instead ...”

“... undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in the process of covering his tracks, consolidating and ...”

“... past lives on. It was fostered in the early years by émigrés from the East. Popular writers like Walter Görlitz also did their bit to sustain pious legends. Then, around the late Seventies, the celebration of Prussia acquired newly fashionable status. In 1979, the best-known liberal historian in the Federal Republic, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, lamented that ...”