“... 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 ...”

“... The diarist Harry Kessler put the same point differently, after meeting him in Paris in June 1907: ‘He looks like a distinguished grandfather, or rather the face is that of a man of the world – but the eye – the eye is that of an apostle untouched by the world.’ By this time Degas had become, as Valéry put it, ‘ever more ...”

“... boy with no parents who took every chance he was offered (along with quite a few he wasn’t) and rose to become a celebrated performing rider in the bullrings of Spain. He kept a journal assiduously as he went, and wrote up his Memoirs in four volumes with hand-drawn illustrations, tables of contents and footnote glosses for those without his linguistic ...”

“... few blocks away, across the creek. Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town ...”

“... of deindustrialisation and plant closure in Northern cities had generated new anxieties. As prices rose and steady work disappeared, the Great Society policies that many had seen as generous and sensible became more divisive. Recent histories of Johnson’s presidency have emphasised the way that his liberalism managed to encode a range of racial stereotypes ...”

“... didn’t like the tut-tutting and veiled threats already coming out of the Elysée. On 24 June the left-wing online-only Mediapart ran a piece by François Bonnet, one of its editorial staff, headlined ‘Brexit, a Welcome Catastrophe’. Brexit voters had thrown a spanner in the works, but was anyone surprised? The Dutch had rejected the proposed EU ...”