“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”