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“... they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul Heinrich Mann. She had definite artistic talents, played the piano quite nicely and sang. My husband learned the entire ...”

“... no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend quotes Michael Collins, who had fought in 1916 and three years later became president of the IRB Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship ...”

“... for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. ‘Half dust, half deity’, Byron wrote of man’s estate, but I applied his meaning more specifically. ‘Alike unfit to sink or soar’ seemed to describe that hanging space, a few feet off the ground, in which Jordan lived. Jordan has presided ...”

“... the wounded Indian troops who were being treated at Brighton Pavilion and in July 1917 addressed Black South African labourers at Abbeville, thanking them for their service on the Western Front, though passing over the racism that had confined them to non-combatant roles. The evidence suggests that George’s respect was often reciprocated. It was white ...”

“... These were daring provocations in a country whose hotels routinely turned him away as a Black man (they would also have been unthinkable in British India). But they titillated staunchly anti-colonialist women, some of whom were recent immigrants themselves, unsure of their position in America. Vivekananda also resisted the assimilation of Vedantism ...”

“... ribaldry and play-acting, all delivered in an unashamedly lower-class fashion. Wedderburn was black, stout, a flamboyant physical presence, and probably not fully literate. He often shared the floor with the impish dwarf Samuel Waddington, another radical tailor, famous for his blasphemous, obscene clowning. In 1830 Wedderburn received another two-year ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, & how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’ It has to be said that most of the letters are not up to this level, and many are dreadfully dull. But one reads on, waiting for the next surprise, which is likely to come when least ...”

“... and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from. Her Fascist sympathies ...”

“... and its Metaphors’. In their attempt to answer the intractable ‘why’ of the massacre, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim sense that the contributory factors they painstakingly assemble don’t quite amount to a reason, and reach for the viral theory. ‘Atrocity,’ they opine, ‘is like a virus known to strike soldiers in combat.’ Charlie Company of ...”

“... engaging chapters in the book are those on Shakespeare, boy actors on the Elizabethan stage and Michael Jackson, all of whom confront us, in Garber’s view, with the radical undecidability that underlies our outrage for disorder. Michael Jackson ‘in performance erases and detraumatises not only the boundaries between ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”

“... Piero’s Car of Death, with tombs from which emerge figures with skeletons painted on their black body-stockings. He can remark that Piero drew well from life, that he painted St Antony wearing spectacles and reading an excellently represented parchment book, that he displayed to perfection the art of colouring in oils. Vasari was clearly aware that ...”

“... bodies. Beit Sahour is a smaller town on the edge of Bethlehem. Angles are important here too, as Michael Awwad, a well-to-do Palestinian shopkeeper, explains with a diagram drawn on the counter of his hardware shop. In July 1988, he begins, Edmon Ghanem, a 17-year-old Palestinian, was walking by a house in Beit Sahour when a large stone fell from the balcony ...”

“... In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock ...”