“... 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 ...”

“... On​ a warm summer evening last June, Rachida Serroukh took her 11-year-old daughter to an introductory evening for new pupils at Holland Park School in West London. Sometimes called the ‘socialist Eton’, the school is one of the few well-performing comprehensives in Kensington and Chelsea, a borough whose stark social and racial inequalities have occupied national attention in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire ...”

“... leading the drought response here. We drove east for hours through the open plains. Termite mounds rose like fingers from the earth, some of them as tall as the thorn trees that were among the only signs of life. Under normal circumstances, rain falls here in two wet seasons a year: the short, autumn deyr rains and the longer, spring gu rains that last from ...”

“... Las Vegas is the national leader in unplanned growth and unruly sprawl, with a population that rose 83 per cent between 1990 and 2000 (more than any other American city), from roughly 850,000 to 1,560,000 – and that’s not counting undocumented residents and the permanent population of tourists (about 250,000). Davis is best known for his books about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anatomy of the brain?’ ‘Not very much.’ ‘Yes, it would take a very long time.’ Aristide rose and walked over to his desk, and picked up a plastic, grapefruit-size model of the brain – one of the few things on it. Then he sat down again across from me and pulled the model apart to show me the corpus callosum, which, he said, processes everything ...”

“... between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it. What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at the outset. Even ...”

“... in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. A profanity, a metamorphosis? Children who were used to strewing rose petals in the path of the Eucharist as it was carried through the village on the feast of Corpus Domini now skipped and sang around the liberty trees set up on the village green. The model lingered in the vast parades of Soviet Russia and continues still in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... home.’ Jackson’s description in ‘The Lottery’ of the ‘clear and sunny’ morning of 27 June, ‘with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day’, seemed so real that some readers wrote to the magazine to ask where the stoning of Tessie Hutchinson had taken place. These queries tired Jackson. ‘The number of people who expected Mrs Hutchinson to win a ...”

“... her subjects. Their fluctuating satins, the swags of laurel-green curtain behind them and the late June evening clouds all rise and fall to an inner rhythm that is unmistakeably amorous. To view this painting is to get tossed up in that convulsion, but it’s also to recognise that its wellsprings do not belong to you. Love such as this is reserved for higher ...”

“... to Oxford instead. Still in the area, however, was Colonel Richard Norton. In the first week of June the Royalist garrison was catastrophically ambushed by Norton while out on a pre-emptive spree, and the second siege began. By now the house had become ‘a great annoyance to all the country’, but it was not long before Norton himself was summoned away to ...”

“... Minister’s preoccupation with military power underlay his long interview with Ha’aretz (18 June 1999), in which he made a case for trying to reach an agreement with Syria first, on the grounds that it was a serious military power whereas the Palestinians were not. ‘The Palestinians are the source of legitimacy for the continuation of the ...”

“... murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where Eco’s plot turns on a secret copy of a lost book, Binet’s this time revolves around a lost cycle of paintings. Another obvious precursor ...”