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* ‘There’s no genuine friendship or kindness or love under heaven,’ wrote Chiang in his surprisingly emotional diary. ‘The relationship of mother and son is the only exception.’ He trusted only Meiling: ‘Apart from my wife, not a single other person can share a little responsibility or a little work with me.’ Chiang granted subsidies to the warlords who backed him and Meiling organized payments, while T. V. Song and H. H. Kung served as premier and finance minister. When assassins tried to kill Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, they shouted, ‘Death to the Song Dynasty!’

* Each family had a hierarchy of boss, captains and soldiers. In a quasi-Catholic ritual, the finger of a ‘made man’ was pricked, blood dripping on to a picture of St Francis of Assisi which was then lit as he swore omertà – silence – with the words: ‘As this saint burns so shall my soul. I enter alive and I only leave dead.’ Crime families recreated the loyalty of real families, though their bosses were actually elected; only the Trafficante family of Florida passed from father to son.

* The kaiser’s eldest, the ex-crown prince Wilhelm, supported Hitler initially, hoping to run for president himself and restore the monarchy.

* At fifteen, Deng had travelled to study and train as a fitter in France, where he became a Marxist and met Zhou Enlai, afterwards returning to join the army of a warlord allied to Chiang. When the general turned against the Communists, Deng fled to Mao and accompanied him on the Long March. At his new base, Mao also promoted Xi Zhongxun, son of a local Shaanxi landowner. Xi’s work during the Forties included United Front work to win over KMT leaders and territory. He met a young girl from Beijing whose father was a KMT official, but she joined the Communists and they married in 1943. When he moved to Beijing, she went with him, working in the propaganda department. Their son Xi Jinping would rule China in the twenty-first century, and his mission would be to complete his father’s work by reclaiming the last KMT bastion, Taiwan.

* After defeating the Bolsheviks in 1920, Piłsudski had retired, returning in 1926 in the face of growing instability, to rule as minister of military affairs. Unusually in a Europe seething with antisemitism, Piłsudski welcomed Poland’s many Jews into his national project, a policy he called ‘national assimilation’. Aware of Polish vulnerability to Hitler, he may have suggested to France launching a pre-emptive strike – before his death from cancer in 1935, which left Poland as a dictatorship without a dictator.

* A visitor from another world witnessed these events. A delegation of American Baptists was touring Germany that month: Michael King, a Baptist minister in Atlanta and father of a boy Michael Jr, aged five, was inspired by visiting Martin Luther’s house in Wittenberg but horrified by Hitler’s antisemitic racism. On his return, he changed his name and that of his son to Martin Luther King and helped draft a declaration by the Baptist World Alliance that ‘This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.’

* Ras Tafari’s coronation, together with Marcus Garvey’s Return to Africa movement which predicted that ‘Kings would come out of Africa’, inspired a new movement, Rastafarianism, in Jamaica whose adherents believed that Haile Selassie marked a black Second Coming of Christ.

* Franco was not the only autocrat in Iberia, but Portugal followed an entirely different model. After the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown in 1910, the country was ill managed and impoverished, though maintaining its empire in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and Goa. But after a military coup in 1926 officers did an unusual thing: instead of appointing a general, they recruited a talented economics professor, António Salazar, son of a provincial estate manager who had almost become a priest, as finance minister. Salazar balanced the budget, then as premier, creating what he called a pluricontinental, imperialist Catholic Novo Estado (New State), he stabilized Portugal as a conservative dictator, based on God, Country and Family, suppressing opposition at home with the help of his secret police the PIDE and rejuvenating the empire by sending settlers to Angola and Mozambique. He was illiberal and authoritarian but also professorial and cerebral; there were few rallies and minimal racism. But the PIDE operated a camp on Cape Verde where prisoners were tortured and killed. Salazar kept out of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War, but he was willing to fight to maintain the Portuguese empire.

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