“... different answer. She says that Twilight came to her in ‘a very vivid dream’ on the night of 1 June 2003 (she remembers the date because her kids started swimming lessons the morning after). The dream must have taken place barely two weeks after the last ever episode of Buffy went out on American TV. Here’s how the coven appears to Bella, who has herself ...”

“... well-being, maternal ambivalence and the direction of feminism runs very high, as Jacqueline Rose searchingly discussed in her essay ‘Mothers’ (LRB, 19 June 2014). Ever since Euripides showed unexpected sympathy with Medea she has been a heroine for real-world questions about women – their status, their weakness ...”

“... father had begun life as a peasant farmer before becoming a builder. Even though François Renard rose to be mayor of Chitry, Renard felt acutely the distance between his life and the lives of his parents. He shared many of his father’s tics – tooth-picking, evasive answers, a fear of enemas – but was alert to their differences, and dreaded the ...”

“... explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001 I was able to drive – nervously but safely – from Kabul to Kandahar, but when I tried to make the same journey in 2011 I could go no ...”

“... in the West End, Emily Wilding Davison’s doomed attack on the king’s horse at the Derby in June 1913 – featured ‘ordinary’ women doing extraordinary things. Atkinson dwells on their experiences, but as a result her book rather loses sight of the thousands on thousands of women who marched in WSPU processions or sold the WSPU paper but never went ...”

“... and a few years later a fourth was added. The cinema staggered on through Covid, then shut in June 2023, before opening in March this year as the Astoria (part of a small group of cinemas, mainly in former holiday destinations). Its 1970s rival, the Orient, became a bingo hall in 1983, and then a nightclub, but has been empty for more than a decade.Cliff ...”

“... new book by the economic historian Ashoka Mody.*The number of Indians who go to sleep hungry rose from 190,000,000 in 2018 to 350,000,000 in 2022, and malnutrition and malnourishment killed more than two-thirds of the children who died under the age of five last year. Meanwhile, Modi’s cronies have flourished. The Economist estimates that the share of ...”

“... policy. ‘How can you be against Islamisation and have a Muslim in a position like that?’ (In June, Yusuf briefly resigned as party chairman after facing a torrent of racist abuse.) On the second morning, I spoke to a man wearing a black T-shirt with an image of a Crusader and the slogan ‘For England’. He was reluctant to speak to a journalist (‘We ...”

“... Tooze shows that in the first year of the war the share of national output going to the military rose by 60 per cent. Hitler resisted pressure from his advisers to prepare for a long war because he believed – correctly – that Germany could not win a long war. Instead, he insisted on the massive expansion of programmes for aircraft production, ammunition ...”

“... What’s​ the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether ...”

“... against the Soviet order and, in particular, became preoccupied with Stalin – whose public cult rose to new heights in the postwar years – and the malignity of his intrusive presence in people’s lives. Everyday life was ‘stuffed like sausage’ with Stalin, as she wrote in her diary in November 1943:You couldn’t go to the kitchen, sit down on a ...”

“... the strategy backfired. Because the military profession was reserved to Mamluks, some of them rose to positions of great power and transcended their original ‘slave’ status, and a Mamluk elite eventually emerged. In 1250 it seized power in Egypt and Syria and established the Mamluk Sultanate, with its capital in Cairo. Later the Ottomans would recycle ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... Her parents had hidden her, the caption to the first picture tells us, with a French family in June 1940; the mother was deported on Convoy 11, 27 July 1942, from Drancy to Auschwitz (13 out of 1000 survived). Ida writes after the Liberation that two gendarmes came to get her at midnight on 30 January 1944. Various neighbours tried to dissuade them; the ...”

“... site was, on average, barely two metres above sea level, and four metres below the level the Haven rose to during the 2013 storm.I have to dwell for a bit on the weirdness of that last sentence. It has ‘sea level’ both as a constant and as a value that goes up and down all the time. Human life and property by the trillion dollarload hang on the millimetre ...”