“... 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 ...”

“... politics.There was an echo of Murat’s laconic severity in Emmanuel Macron’s announcement on 9 June 2024: ‘I therefore dissolve the National Assembly.’ An hour earlier, exit polls had shown that his party, Renaissance, and its allies had been routed by the far right in elections for the European Parliament. The dissolution wasn’t a coup in the ...”

“... Empire Windrush, bringing eight hundred Caribbean passengers to Britain, docked at Tilbury on 21 June 1948, while the act was still going through Parliament. Here again, myth has fogged up the truth. It’s vaguely believed that Britain deliberately recruited Jamaicans to relieve the desperate postwar labour shortage. But the opposite was true. Although one ...”

“... with flowers, though Morozov’s visit was no concern of his. At last the great day arrived: 23 June 1902. At ten in the morning, Uncle Kostia and Chariton set out in a newly lacquered carriage to meet Morozov; the coachman was in the driving seat, wearing a pleated and embroidered waistcoat. I stayed behind, sitting on a bench in the sun, impatient to see ...”

“... since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ...”

“... such loads across enormous distances. A new type of fencing was clearly required.In 1873 Henry Rose, who farmed near Waterman Station in Illinois, thought of a new way to control a ‘breachy’ cow. (‘Breachy’ was Rose’s word.) He attached a wooden board, studded with sharp pieces of wire, to the cow’s head, so ...”

“... Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in the process of covering his tracks, consolidating and extending his power and justifying his original duplicity, he was knowingly ...”

“... teams won even when they had no business winning, when they were outmatched – as they were in June three years ago, in the last game anyone thought he would play. I lived in Britain at the time and stayed up to watch that championship match on TV – a gesture towards my childhood. Embittered by basketball, I drank cold tea and pinched myself ...”

“... sending the major into retirement with his life pension as a Free Officer intact. Saddam Hussein rose from a routinely violent milieu in the bandit country round the small town of Takrit and it was as a terrorist and later torturer on behalf of the Ba’ath Party that he made his way up. The Ba’ath Party was an elaborately-structured ideological group ...”

“... almost unchanged for two hundred years’. In fact, the farms incessantly changed hands, rents rose, arrears were no longer allowed, half the population left Orkney between 1861 and 1901 and a third left the three islands in the Muirs’ group during the thirty years which surrounded Edwin’s childhood. Small farms were amalgamated, the families ...”

“... the official mortality limit was not reached until 24 May, and then dropped in the middle of June and through July. Similarly, though Bartholomew Fair was allowed to open in August, Barroll insists that the possibility of theatrical performances ‘seems dubious’. This argument about the dating of Othello and Measure – and a number of other plays ...”

“... portrait commissions; and he started the wood panel altarpiece that would become the Feast of the Rose Garlands for the church of San Bartolomeo near the Rialto (‘In a week,’ he wrote on 6 January 1506, ‘I shall have the white ground and rubbing down all finished’). During his stay, Dürer sent back letters to Willibald Pirckheimer – a wealthy ...”

“... the previous eighty years.The independence ceremony took place in Leopoldville (Kinshasa) on 30 June 1960. King Baudouin of the Belgians was there, with Gaston Eyskens, the Prime Minister, and Patrice Lumumba as the newly elected Prime Minister of the Congo. But what happened was nothing like those touching, bittersweet moments when the Union Jack was ...”

“... served as usual with French bread, warm croissant, café au lait and Fort Dauphin’s speciality, rose-pink papaya. The terrace is set about with hibiscus and orchids. A ten-foot poinsettia tree holds both cream-coloured and scarlet flowers over my head. In front of me spreads the great fan of a Traveller’s Palm, symbol of Madagascar. Wendy, my colleague ...”

“... war he kept getting sick or wounded on the eve of great battles that decimated his regiment, and rose to the Labour leadership because most of the obvious contenders had lost their seats in the National Government landslide of 1931. Apart from sheer luck, what changed matters was his ascension to the rank of major in the war and the postwar Labour tide that ...”