“... by the Congress Government at the centre to Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, during the time when he rose to power. His extreme postures had started out as tactics in one kind of political game, and had hardened into the strategy of an altogether more sinister struggle: the Akali Dal could survive only by joining the fundamentalists who had been sent to destroy ...”

“... the earth, and the particles of their warmth, despairing, concentrated their last effort in a soft rose light along the western aspect of the strip of cloud. Down on the rocks a squat yew tree, clinging to the face, shivered and drew itself up. The shadows came together and lay cramped stiffly over it.   We turned our backs finally to the hills and began ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... as it does in Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, but there’s no saving grace.It was a June night, soft and nubile, with a marvellous moon; a nightingale threw its impetuous garland into the air. She lay listening to it and thinking with sad pleasure of the time when Glastonbury was in prison, how grand she was in her solitude, ordering everything ...”

“... when skilfully repurposed.De la Mare hero-worshipped Hardy, whom he first visited at Max Gate in June 1921. As was his wont, Hardy took him to the graves of Emma and his parents and sister in Stinsford churchyard, where de la Mare watched him scrape off the moss from their tombstones with a homemade implement contrived for that purpose. They shared an ...”

“... a Nile cruise. The two men had been the target of another assassination attempt a year earlier. In June 1995, Mubarak had taken the precaution of flying his armour-plated car to Addis Ababa for the twenty-minute drive from the airport to the conference hall where the summit of the Organisation of African Unity was to be held. Halfway along one of the city’s ...”

“... I’ve set right down and eat with him’? Twain’s memory was incandescent; when it rose up and seized him he wrote the thing down right where he was. In The Innocents Abroad, for example, the writing of a few lines about a Greek sculpture attributed to Phidias suddenly called up a ghastly scene from Twain’s youth. The pen was in his hand and ...”

“... truth that seemed to pervade society.’ As so often, war began in confusion and inadvertence. In June 1853, having made demands on the Porte which were designed to be rejected, Russia attacked the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Nicholas’s worst miscalculation was his assumption that Austria would support him. Only a few years had passed since ...”

“... exterminate all Armenian males of 12 years and over’. On 20 April, the Armenians of Van rose in self-defence, and held on till a Russian advance reached them in May. Four days later, as British forces were about to land at Gallipoli, Armenian deputies and former ministers were arrested. In Anatolia, the killings and deportations spread, supposedly ...”

“... Sobchak, any more than Putin’s admission that he was a KGB officer (he soon resigned). Putin rose rapidly to become deputy mayor, where he gained a reputation for silent, chilly efficiency. In a period of wild gangsterism and corruption, he was considered clean. Some who knew him think that he suffered from pathological coldness, a deficit of ...”

“... team. By his account, a polling phenomenon known as ‘the Farage paradox’ showed that when Ukip rose in the polls, support for leaving the EU did the opposite. Sunder Katwala, the director of the think-tank British Future, noticed the correlation in 2014. For most of the four-year period between the euro crisis of 2009 and the rise to prominence of Ukip in ...”

“... Maria Mastai Ferretti when he acceded to the papal throne after a hurried two-day conclave on 16 June 1846, but he profited from the general relief at the death of his predecessor, the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a ...”

“... was now in his thirties) the gentleman’s title of master. Cromwell was the boy from Putney who rose and fell at the court of Henry VIII with, as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography shows, spectacular unobtrusiveness. A man who in life strenuously resisted easy categories, Cromwell has been forced into the competing roles of hero and villain many times ...”

“... and professionally stuck, working as an ‘obscure assistant judge’ while his contemporaries rose through the magistracy. America provided a way out. Under the ‘honourable pretext’ of writing a report on the American penitentiary system, Tocqueville could leave France for a year and return with a publication that would restore his reputation. He and ...”

“... men, Proust and Elvis, Muhammad Ali and the Beatles, are grouped around an unfolding, vulval red rose. The only woman depicted is Jackie Kennedy in the open car, pink pillbox hat turned towards her husband as he clutches his throat. II is all women, soft-porn pin-ups surrounding a stark, full-frontal nude with pubic hair, all set against the landscape garden ...”