[4] Magnus's father was Jewish-American, and his mother "believed herself the illegitimate daughter of Wilhelm I, King of Prussia and first German Kaiser.
"[5] Frances Wilson writes: Magnus learned to speak several languages badly, to produce indifferent prose, to mismanage money, to appreciate good food and to keep up appearances.
In 1901 he worked — probably as manager — for a new literary magazine called the Smart Set, which would later publish a number of Lawrence's poems and stories.
[12] Minutes before his suicide in Malta, to avoid arrest for debt, he made Norman Douglas his literary executor.
[13] Magnus's Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, published in 1924, four years after his death, was notable for igniting a long-running feud between two of the most distinguished expatriate English authors, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, who had been close friends of his.
An early draft of the introduction in manuscript, now in the possession of the University of Nottingham, shows that Lawrence had intended an even more savage denunciation of Magnus.