“... once communists were in power in Beijing, ‘the stakes for its relationship with the Soviet Union rose dramatically, and with that came pressure and volatility – particularly for the Chinese Communist Party elite.’ (McGuire gives less attention to the perspective of those who propelled the breakdown: why did the relationship sour? Why was the crisis ...”

“... driven by the Vietnam War and by LA’s many defence companies, the unemployment rate in Watts rose sharply in the 1960s: by 1964 it was 30 per cent for men. Many employers, while officially against racial discrimination, refused to hire African Americans. Marooned in Watts, young men were regularly stopped and searched, and arrested if they ...”

“... when to exchange whispers for another round of drinks’. In the years that followed, as Hitler rose to power, Heinrich Mann was viewed by some as a significant figure from the left who was above politics, who, as late as 1932 in a letter to Thomas had emphasised his support for ‘a French-German federal state’, and had no time for German nationalism. In ...”

“... professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved ...”

“... which determined it, is quite well caught by two entries, one for 11 February 1965 and one for 17 June 1966: Once again we are taking the subsidiary role, the pro-American line, and Michael Stewart as our new Foreign Secretary is following it very faithfully indeed. And in all this Harold is deeply, personally committed ... He just saw that one must either ...”

“... he noticed a vocal score of a very recently published opera. As though drawn by a magnet, he rose and took the volume from the shelf, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. It was the ‘Good Night’ scene from Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia ... Ten years after Lenny’s visit to our home West Side Story excited the musical ...”

“... Mozart has probably suffered more than most from this attention, since the romantic myths that rose around him during the 19th century have proved extraordinarily tenacious. So cliché’d is the sad tale of his last years that we can, aping Humbert Humbert’s laconic account of his mother’s demise – ‘(picnic, lightning)’ – get by with a ...”

“... continual ill-will between Bligh, the master and the carpenter, on the edge of violence. Yet on 14 June the launch did reach Coupang in Timor. The Dutch treated them very kindly, and eventually those who survived the rigours of the boat voyage and the climate of the East Indies reached home, where Bligh at once set about justifying the loss of his ship. The ...”

“... names of the Marlowes’ neighbours as if he were doffing his cap to them in the street: Alderman Rose the woollen-draper; Harmon Verson the immigrant glazier; Laurence Applegate the tailor, who spoke ‘bawdy words’ about Mistress Hurt; Goodman Shaw the basketmaker, into whose house John Marlowe stormed one evening in 1579 and said, ‘Michael Shaw thou ...”

“... one more scandal bedevilling his efforts to set himself up as a political leader of the Right. In June 1925, he managed to get away again, travelling with Nansen to Armenia and the Caucasus to set up a scheme to help Armenians settle in the Soviet Union. The project occupied him intermittently until it finally collapsed in 1929. In the meantime, he found ...”

“... been much in the news in the United States in the weeks before the Korean airliner disaster. In June 1983, a satellite had spotted the construction of a huge new Russian radar system at Krasnoyarsk. At once the American Far Right, which was anxious to prevent any further progress in the disarmament talks, seized on the new radar system as a clear breach of ...”

“... were informed, indeed participated. But did the Russians get Ultra after the Nazi invasion of June 1941 transformed them into allies? Boyle is ambiguous. At one point he observes that ‘Stalin and his underlings were … being told nearly everything they required to know at first hand,’ rendering information from their agents within British ...”

“... it: the painting would merely mark another stage in his descent into neglect and debt. On 22 June, in front of his vast unfinished canvas in the sweltering studio, he shot himself and then cut his throat. At the inquest the coroner’s summing-up dwelt chiefly on Sir Robert Peel’s generosity to the artist’s family. Haydon was not even the hero of his ...”

“... of the question. Stephens reports that the decision to enter was taken in the Treasury in early June. One of the Chancellor’s aides leaked it to the Financial Times, saying that Major wanted to enter at a relatively high rate to protect his anti-inflationary policy. The markets promptly took the hint and the pound ...”

“... iconography is indeed eerily familiar: Hebrew lettering framed by lilies, a memorial candle, and a rose whose thorny stem evokes barbed wire. As Veidlinger notes, however, the book was written in 1924, and the slaughter it commemorates was a different khurbn (catastrophe), a different Holocaust. ‘Or, perhaps’ – and this is the nub of his argument ...”