“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was beginning to falter. According to the Statistical Review of World Energy, published every June by BP, oil consumption jumped from 69.5 million barrels a day at the end of 1995 to 85.2 million barrels at the end of 2007. Some of this huge rise was generated by increased fuel consumption in the United States (where giant SUVs had become all the ...”

“... was spare capacity: control over existing oilfields that could be brought on line when demand rose and shuttered when demand fell. At one point, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had occupied this role; in the Opec era, Saudi Arabia did its best. But the role of swing producer exacts serious costs. You have to be willing to buy dear and sell cheap, because the ...”

“... really worth while. Fuck them.’ Fuck them indeed, but only up to a point. Six months later on 14 June 1988, he trumpeted: We are now poised to put in place my personal chef d’oeuvre, the Fur Labelling Order. It has to lie on the table for a month, and then a brief debate in the House after ten, and if necessary a perfunctory whipped vote on a two liner. I ...”

“... writing Too close to the bone – this must have been in March 1988. A few weeks later Jacqueline Rose and I went away with Jen White and Allon to spend a night in Wells and to look at the cathedral, which Allon knew by heart from photographs but had never seen. By now, a second bone-marrow transplant seemed to have failed; he was very weak, and had to spend ...”

“... enterprise would have been seriously imperilled: This is what happened. On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s hands and face; he glowed like an avenger ...”

“... before. No less striking is that whereas in 2008, 78 per cent of Jews voted for Obama, a poll in June this year found that only 56 per cent still supported him. By a majority of more than seven to one, Jewish Democrats take Israel’s side against the president and by more than two to one they agree that he is ‘naive in thinking he can make peace with the ...”

“... Britain’s Jews was relatively secure, became more problematic as social and political tensions rose. The Jewish population, around 60,000 in 1880, was 180,000 by 1905; anti-Jewish sentiment also increased. There were claims that East European Jews were essentially un-English and unassimilable and that Britain should avoid ‘a premature fusion with ...”

“... of annual growth in government outlays for research, presidential medal-pinning ceremonies in the Rose Garden for revered elders of the profession, and expressions of respect for science produce a wonderful tranquillising effect on the endless frontier. With rare exceptions, this combination has prevailed for most of the collaboration between science and ...”