“... her 19-year-old lover, Kirk McCambley. She has some experience of the mental health profession. In June 2008, days before she embarked on the affair, she said on the radio: ‘I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn them away from what they are ...”

“... of a ‘standing up’ after long prostration.) The Polish elections had taken place in June, but the Communist retreat did not become an uncontrollable rout there until a few months later. Much the same was true of Hungary, while the interventions of ‘the people’ on the streets of Prague, Leipzig, Berlin, Timisoara, Bucharest – the events ...”

“... onset of world depression: exports collapsed and competition from imports increased, unemployment rose towards three million, there were deficits in the balance of payments, in the unemployment insurance fund and in the Budget, and sterling came under severe international pressure. Yet in conditions which required firm, decisive government, the 1929 General ...”

“... while many of the most familiar words in the language are equally debarred from both texts. Perec rose to the Oulipian challenge on many other occasions, and in a variety of literary forms. For example, there is a brief play, Les Horreurs de la Guerre, in which the dialogue consists entirely in the enunciation of the letters of the alphabet from A to Z. (It ...”

“... diaries to be published and promised that they would be ‘frank’. The world’s press rose to the bait, expecting another instalment of Hollywood-Babylon: ‘Private Lives of Stars Laid Bare in Diaries,’ the Telegraph forecast. Prudently, Isherwood had destroyed the journals that would have interested posterity most: the record of his life ...”

“... rise; celebrities, such as Phil Collins and Tracey Emin, threatened to leave Britain if income tax rose. We are all too conscious of anxieties concerning immigration in British society, yet the latent fear of emigration – by capital and capitalists – has shaped our politics far more decisively over the past thirty or forty years. Contemporary forms of ...”

“... him. I made him some instant coffee and he sat down and told me about himself. It was then June 1983. I had been in Saudi Arabia for six months. My husband worked for a Toronto-based company of consulting geologists, and had been seconded by them to the Ministry of Mineral Resources. Most of his colleagues were housed in family ‘compounds’ of ...”

“... he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No scores of ...”

“... in public – as once at a royal levee, resplendent ‘in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons’. What energy he had, what persistence, what lapses and arrests. By the end of his tumultuous life he had at least become the grey eminence saluted in the title conferred on the last of the ...”

“... was set up as a result of the all-important High Court judgment in Mabo v. Queensland, which in June 1992 overturned the old fiction of terra nullius, acknowledged the prior ownership of the continent by its first peoples and confirmed their right to make claims on it now. Two days before Christmas 1993, after months of intensely difficult negotiation by ...”

“... randomly taken, and mocked by grandiloquent chapter titles (‘A Star is Born’, ‘Mighty Like a Rose’). The sequence records her birth inter faeces (her mother has taken an ill-timed overdose of salts); her ungrateful father, desperate for a ‘laddie’, names her after the passing milkman’s horse; the narrative jumps seven years to the heroine’s ...”

“... Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same time. Gordon Brown – who liked to cloak redistributive policies in communitarian, traditionalist rhetoric – is said to have been the first to use it, in ...”

“... ignored subject at the centre of the global economy. The truth is that shipping is responsible, as Rose George put it in the subtitle of her classic 2013 book on the subject, for ‘90 Per Cent of Everything’. It is the physical equivalent of the internet, the other industry which makes globalisation possible. The internet abolishes national boundaries for ...”

“... Harvest, ‘the private diary of David Peterley now for the first time printed’, opened in June 1930 as David Peterley disembarked at Liverpool. This framing of the book provoked much bewilderment. Readers were not told whether or when David Peterley had died or how his papers came to reach McGill University in Canada. They were told that since 1946 ...”

“... to call it. Referendum Day fell strangely, smack between the birthday of my Francophile father (22 June) and my Francophile mother (24 June), both long dead. That evening, after the polls had closed, there were eight of us at supper; all had voted Remain, while feeling little enthusiasm for those who had publicly argued our ...”