“... was shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The date was 5 June 1968; and he had just won a narrow victory in the California Democratic primary. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant angry about Kennedy’s support for Israel, fired three shots at close range. Kennedy died the next day. For millions of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from 11,000 police and military personnel deployed at the beginning of the year, the number rose to over 52,000, with costs increasing accordingly. This was largely because of the heavy additional obligations that the UN assumed in Somalia and Bosnia. In both, its original function was the distribution and protection of humanitarian relief – a task ...”

“... allows. He makes great play with a record, in Emily’s journal, of Alfred’s gallantly picking a rose for her one balmy June evening. Surely that night they did not retire to separate bedrooms? More daringly, and wholly unconvincingly, Thorn hazards that Tennyson may have had an extramarital affair with the legendarily ...”

“... boss, the Mayor. This is to prevent the Police being used for political ends. Chief Daryl F. Gates rose through the ranks to the highest position in the LAPD. He is a moral absolutist who believes drug dealers should be shot, and who disowned his own son when he was convicted of drug possession. Gates is white, and is commonly suspected of being hostile to ...”

“... an overall inflationary tendency which fuelled the rise in the price of rice, but the floods of June-September 1974 also sharply reduced the demand for labour, leading to unemployment and a decline in money wages. (But Sen is not able to penetrate fully the mystery of why money wages fell more sharply in the districts worst hit by the famine.) 3. The groups ...”

“... older, was standing by now on a plateau of distinction: beyond it, peaks in the distance, rose the writings of Locke and ‘Neuton’, the Englishmen Voltaire revered. Diderot had taken a step towards this level three years earlier when he published his breezily sceptical Philosophical Thoughts: ‘criminal opinions’, in the judgment of the Paris ...”

“... skills offer them the same possibilities? According to Chesterton, ‘twenty million young women rose to their feet and said: “We will not be dictated to,” and immediately became shorthand typists.’ But they had also found a skill that afforded them a better wage than factory work, improved conditions, and, if they were so inclined, the opportunity to ...”

“... were arrested and committed for trial. Thirteen were found guilty by the Basutoland High Court. In June 1949, after an appeal to the Privy Council, the chieftainess and her closest accomplice were hanged. ’Mamakhabane was the first woman and the first senior chief to be hanged for a medicine murder. Soon after, in August 1949, two of the highest chiefs in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... battles, we know precious little about how it actually developed. Repulsed from Orléans on 14 June, Attila was brought to battle by a combined army of Goths, Romans and Aetius’ clients among the petty tribes of the Rhineland. Both armies suffered heavy casualties, the aged Theoderic was killed and Attila suffered his first great battlefield loss. Gothic ...”

“... traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare. In late June 1963, the front page of the Daily Mirror had a banner headline: ‘Prince Philip and the Profumo Scandal – Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded’. Excited readers scanned the story in vain for what the rumour might be. The Prince Philip ‘allegation’ was a ...”

“... was chosen for the harem of the Xianfeng emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1852. In 1856 she rose steeply in rank after giving birth to the first (and as it happened only) male heir to the throne. When the emperor died in 1861, Cixi’s five-year-old son became the Tongzhi emperor. A regency of six male officials along with the late emperor’s ...”

“... silent but for the constant ‘voice of cold water’, with skies of ‘cutting snow’, even in June. This is a land of ‘fear and shock’ where the buzzard is king: He soars and he hovers, rocking on his wings, He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, He catches the trembling of small hidden things, He tears them to pieces, dropping them from the ...”