“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a blue velvet Victor Edelstein dress belonging to Princess Diana that sold for £222,500 in June 1997. The actor and peroxophile Tony Curtis, who must have forgotten that he once said kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler, got out of his seat at the auction to tell reporters that Marilyn would have been thrilled. ‘She’d have enjoyed the fact that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the standard set by Dresden. Occasionally, he just gets things wrong, as when he writes that ‘in June 1956, widespread rioting in Poland led Khrushchev to appoint the relatively liberal Wladyslaw Gomulka . . . as leader of the Polish Communist Party’ – a travesty of that crisis – or when he says that the indigenous ‘Prusy’ of Prussia were ...”

“... recantation of all the leading Norwich evangelicals. Two of these recantations, those of Thomas Rose and Robert Watson, were coerced, and both men subsequently revealed their true opinions by fleeing abroad, but their surrenders were skilfully publicised at the time by the Catholic authorities, and certainly helped demoralise the Norwich gospellers. The ...”