“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them in 1948 and had done nothing to help them since. The Palestinian national movement, which rose to prominence under Yasir Arafat’s leadership in the late 1960s, was defined in large part by its belief that Palestinians had to rely on themselves. Mahmoud Darwish was not the only one to note that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded ...”

“... was still Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated, having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June 1990, Bush père could claim that a ‘rising tide of democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved hemisphere’ would soon make possible a ‘free trade zone stretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego’. Latin America’s conversion to ...”

“... Committee started providing estimates of war-related deaths since the conflict began in 1998: they rose from 1.7 million in 2001 to 5.4 million in January 2008. If correct, these figures account for about 8 per cent of the current population of the country. They were called into question in 2008, however, when two Belgian demographers concluded that the excess ...”

“... to return favours … which could make her seem cold and ungrateful’. Carruth’s wife, Rose Marie, remembered the meadow where Conrad killed himself as the site of an infamous picnic, where an increasingly abrasive Rich announced that ‘she planned to give away her pots and pans’ and ‘do a lot less cooking’.After Conrad’s death, Rich ...”

“... antiquity. He documented his travels (he was fussy about place and places; his life’s compass-rose was Russia and Spain, Sweden and Egypt). He wrote ‘thing-poems’, Dinggedichte: poems about things, but also poems that are ‘a thing’, not a mood or an atmosphere, as too many of their predecessors had been. A few of them cast some of the Malte ...”

“... into the stalls by the screen villain. (Woody Allen appropriated the conceit in both The Purple Rose of Cairo and his short story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’, where the narrator, a professor of literature, finds himself trapped with Madame Bovary and visible to the novel’s readers.) Keaton’s films are filled with wonder at the camera’s ability to mix ...”

“... in bed together, giving Vanessa the unwelcome opportunity to see whether she was right. Sue ‘rose to the occasion of a crisis, as she always does,’ Julian told his mother, ‘and was very superb – it’s a pity furious women attract me so much. And so completely charming.’ He resigned; she turned down his offer of marriage. Bell didn’t leave ...”