“... him’ – a serious dereliction of duty. When Julius Vindex, the governor of a province in Gaul, rose up against him, Nero ‘failed to address the Senate and the people in person, but instead summoned some of Rome’s leading men to his house’. Planning to confront Vindex in Gaul (he never went), Nero’s ‘overriding concern … was to source wagons ...”

“... divided between Jews and goyim. If there was a plane crash and fifty people were killed, my Aunt Rose, the most conservative voice in my family, would scan the newspaper list of victims for Jewish names and exclaim: ‘What an unglick; six Jews died.’ All of my family had a special feeling for Jonas Salk or Albert Einstein that they did not have for ...”

“... non-regicides for rigorous punishment short of death. Milton’s name was floated briefly on 18 June, but not seconded; several of his powerful friends, including Marvell and Sir William Davenant, whom Milton had saved from execution as a Royalist conspirator under the Commonwealth, helped to rescue him. The recollection of images from Macbeth might also ...”

“... mirror up to them, in the tawdry and convoluted intrigues of The Jew of Malta, performed at the Rose Theatre in February 1592, a few weeks after his deportation from Flushing. So we have these two spies or projectors, these two Richards or Dicks, and their apparent recollections of Marlowe’s blasphemies. They closely corroborate one another on the ...”

“... harp that once through Tara’s halls’, ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and especially ‘The last rose of summer’. These songs were performed in concerts, and in the polite parlours and drawing rooms where Moore thought they belonged. ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ no doubt owed much of its popularity to the traditional air ‘The Old Head of Dennis’, to ...”

“... craving to meet artists. An event has been proposed: a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet ...”

“... Writers’ Conference for the Defence of Culture’, held in Paris in June 1935. As a result of one of the Congress’s resolutions, Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Willi Bredel of the KPD, were appointed editors of Das Wort, a new German language periodical to be published in Moscow. For various reasons, some of them purely ...”

“... when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter’s skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the 12-year-old Ranuccio Farnese and another of Clarissa Strozzi ...”

“... the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the opposite of what lives in the work of dunces, and ...”

“... by a rendezvous with the Duke of Wellington in the corner of a foreign field, near Brussels, in June 1815. Lady Frances’ hectic alternations of lust and shame continued to make her an alarming mistress, as Scrope Davies’s trunk, full of memorabilia, has recently disclosed. Scrope’s failure to take Byron’s advice to “marry and beget some ...”

“... perverse tableaux of mannequins are much like Paul MacCarthy’s; Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose make Gillian Wearing’s videos look rather sweet and innocent; LA ‘pathetic art’ is alive and feebly kicking in London; Hadrian Pigott’s instrument case inevitably calls to mind Michele Rollman’s instrument case; Lyle Ashton Harris finds a ...”

“... the large-scale cultivation of tobacco and cotton. The peasants, aided by the Communist Party, rose up and fought this servitude. By now the brahmins were in power in Delhi. No untouchable or low-caste Hindu harboured many illusions. Some even feared that after the British withdrawal things would get worse for them. They did. The Indian army invaded the ...”

“... to lead an army to relieve the hard-pressed English Seneschal of Gascony, Oliver Ingham; by June it was clear that it was not going to get off the ground, and was likewise cancelled. In the autumn of 1341 an expedition to Brittany was projected, and desperate efforts made to assemble ships at Portsmouth; in November cancellation again. In 1338, Edward ...”

“... which were administered by French officers,’ he told me when I interviewed him in June 2009. ‘The economy was entirely in French hands: agriculture, trade, everything. Lawyers and even notaries were exclusively French. Throughout my secondary education, all but two of my teachers were French. It was against this overbearing reality that my ...”

“... he adopted his pseudonym in 1989, at the dawn of the country’s short-lived perestroika – he rose through the ranks of the army. Before leaving Algeria in 2000, he fought against the Islamists for eight years, and even helped lay two ambushes intended for his cadet school classmate Said Mekhloufi, by then an Islamist militant. (Mekhloufi was eventually ...”