“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... developments in Europe, he took advantage of an amnesty to return to Italy with sixty comrades in June 1848. Wandering around central Italy gathering volunteers, he was in Bologna in November when news came that Pius had fled from Rome. He hurried south and spent some months in Rieti, forty miles north-east of the city, training 1500 men who would be known as ...”

“... to consult the works of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab philosopher who argued that empires rose and fell, bursting onto the world stage full of nomadic vigour before fizzling out due to laziness. The Ottomans believed that the Greek rebellion had only become possible because of their own slide into decadence. ‘The infidels could dare to revolt ...”

“... used for: to preserve and then display an idealised version of home life – aren’t we happy! In June 1944, the Allies had taken Rome and landed in Normandy. Braun tried to cheer Hitler up by screening a number of colour films of earlier days to the assembled company at the Obersalzberg. ‘I have never seen him so relaxed on film,’ Goebbels said. Braun ...”

“... for decades. And lastly her boss at Lucky magazine, the ‘legendary beauty director Jean Godfrey-June’, supported her and forgave her, encouraged her to go to rehab, responded to her suffering the way a mother might. Marnell is given to hyperbole – the word ‘insane’ recurs, often as a term of praise – but her worship of her bosses and colleagues ...”