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“... a grandchild). Her husband Asa uses the anger he feels against his parents (Yehuda and Naomi) to power a brilliant academic career and to elaborate a highly serviceable image of himself as an intellectual subversive and emotional martyr. Tsvi, his older brother, has opted for a view of himself as degenerate and immoral, at once burlesquing the father he ...”

“... He designed Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral and the subtle profile of the erstwhile Bankside Power Station – now disfigured as Tate Modern, lest anyone doubt that it purveys art in place of electricity. After Lutyens, Sir Giles was perhaps England’s best architect during the first half of the last century. These are the two celebrities from a ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... a gas station on the outskirts of St Louis. This sounds like snobbery. Lindbergh’s marriage to Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow – banker, ambassador and millionaire – took him into a more elevated society than that of Little Falls; Lincoln Kirstein, the balletomane, and his sister were part of it. Harold Nicolson also made a social judgment ...”

“... accustomed to her beauty, therefore never really interested in anything and with little or no power of admiration.’ Mrs Asquith’s arrogance is often staggering. She treats being the prime minister’s wife as a sort of high constitutional office. When the Zeppelins raid London, she sends for the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to give her a ...”

“... and Qatar; and most Egyptians were willing to give him a chance. He entered office vowing to share power, only to hoard it. He antagonised Copts, said nothing when a mob carried out an anti-Shia pogrom, and stoked sectarian animosities by aligning himself with jihadists in Syria. For all his promises to relieve the suffering in Gaza, he seemed more interested ...”

“... Anne and I step aside from the slow-motion procession of tourists walking among the market stalls of Florence in the roasting sunshine and enter the Baptistery, a compact octagonal church with oblong-patterned, black-and-white façades like an enormous liquorice allsort. Our heads tilt upwards and we stare at the swarming life of the eight mosaic panels in the cupola, a hundred feet above us ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An ...”

“... the favourite occupation of his leisure hours had long been associated with the demonstration of power and prestige; Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (first English translation, 1561) was only the first of many treatises on aristocratic conduct to recommend drawing as an activity appropriate to men of the highest rank. Moreover, in a nation where ...”

“... men is killed for a reason that has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with abuses of power by the government and its friends. The women don’t know the reason, and therefore don’t know it is unrelated to them; and we are invited to make all kinds of connection between a violent Caribbean dictatorship and a mild money-based sexual ...”

“... sacred breast’. It is a religious object, exhibited with veneration in relation to the Divine Power, as in Egyptian images of Isis suckling Horus, or nursing a pharaoh with the divine milk of life. Like most scholars who do not go into Egyptology, Yalom does not bother with deities other than Isis, or reflect on the worship of Hathor – often represented ...”

“... and rank. (As an aristocrat, Montagu thought the Christian religion too disrespectful of rank and power.) Docile also swallows all the stuff about the duty of a woman to maintain chastity no matter what should befall her, and she knows a woman should be faithful in the face of all temptations and injuries. Docile begins with the thoughtfulness about virtue ...”

“... of men placing women ‘on thrones’. In Wollstonecraft’s view, such passions gave women a power of sorts, but they were adored rather than loved, and woman ‘is quickly scorn’d when not ador’d’. Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch. It ...”

“... glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of stories, poems, essays, bulletins and magazine ...”

“... they cou’d: If they forbear their Neighbours to devour, ’Tis not for want of Will, but want of Power Rochester was, surprisingly, one of Defoe’s favourite poets. The allusion in the second line is to an aphorism from Rochester’s ‘Satire against Reason and Mankind’: ‘For all men would be cowards if they durst.’ However, you wouldn’t want to ...”