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“... 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 ...”

“... thoughts dwelling darkly on the Americans: one and a half million were stationed in the UK by June 1944, more than three million passed through Britain in the course of the war. The Americans were better paid, better dressed and appeared to have ready access to silk stockings, sweets and cigarettes. Not a few soldiers feared their wives or girlfriends had ...”

“... famous of these, the story of the removal of Celan’s mother and father: One Friday evening in June 1942, so the story goes, when weekend deportation action had begun against the Jewish population of Czernowitz, Paul Celan tried to convince his parents to hide out with him at a factory on the edge of town. They refused. He left without them. Returning ...”

“... hopped about on the tops of the gravestones that stuck out above the slimy water. A broken cross rose from the centre of a reed bed. I went back to Kut in 2013, by which time the cemetery could only be reached through a locked metal door. Inside, the swamp had been drained and most of the gravestones had gone, but the broken cross was still there. Hundreds ...”

“... it as our best coup.’ After a rocky start, the Baath Party consolidated power, and Saddam rose rapidly through its ranks, displacing his cousin, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, as president in 1979. He immediately cemented his control with a bloody purge of Baathists deemed insufficiently loyal to his rule.The following year, Saddam attacked Iran, sparking an ...”

“... kicked off events by justifying the turning of the Estates General into a Constituent Assembly in June 1789. (The Third Estate was ‘everything’, Sieyès argued in answer to his question, though it had so far been ‘nothing’ in the political order and aspired to become ‘something’.) He also helped bring the revolution to an end, playing a crucial ...”

“... Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new ...”