“... actually fell – a staggering feat: real wages declined for seven straight years – while they rose some 15 per cent in France and Britain, and between 25 and 35 per cent in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. With devaluation now barred, the Mediterranean countries are suffering a drastic loss of competitiveness that augurs ill for the whole southern tier ...”

“... with normal, non-police defendants – a trial could be expected within six to nine months. In June 1991, however, lawyers for the detectives made an abuse of process application, arguing that the case be dismissed on the grounds that their clients could not expect a fair trial after the adverse publicity and after such a lapse of time; and further ...”

“... should the capital fall to the Entente. In this emergency, the CUP wasted no time. By early June, centrally directed and co-ordinated destruction of the Armenian population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann, writes, ‘the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three ...”

“... that he managed to survive three years before getting killed during the final German retreat in June 1918. My mother, born eight years after his death, claims to have heard as a child that he was shot accidentally – ‘by his own guns’. But my uncle Neil, her only brother, can’t believe ‘they would have told the family that.’ Newton was said to be ...”

“... of the agrégation (he came first, she second), and announced that from ‘now on’ – it was June 1929 – ‘I’m going to take you under my wing.’ Beauvoir was 21. He urged her to try to ‘preserve what was best in me: my love of personal freedom, my passion for life, my curiosity, my determination to be a writer’; she thought she had found the ...”

“... about the same, a little above three thousand. Two weeks later, when Trump was claiming in the Rose Garden that China and the WHO between them had raised the worldwide caseload by a factor of twenty, the number of dead in China had barely budged: the epidemic there was under control. In the US, more than 23,000 had perished. By the time of Azar’s address ...”

“... the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other enemies is very far from over. He is going after the ...”

“... the young Napolitano opted for the coming force of communism. Joining the PCI in late 1945, he rose rapidly through its ranks, reaching the Central Committee in just over a decade. When Russian troops and tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolt in 1956, he applauded. ‘The Soviet intervention has made a decisive contribution, not only to preventing Hungary ...”

“... them. When he saw the ménage that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his ...”

“... fanned the cult of Mao and shared in his repressions, an issue the party’s official verdict of June 1981 on the Cultural Revolution could sidestep.What is Chen’s explanation of Zhou’s record after 1966? One factor was not specific to him. Party discipline was internalised by communists of his generation as a moral condition of collective ...”

“... credit since he took over in 2006 – the portfolio of the government’s development bank, BNDES, rose sevenfold after 2007. Offering preferential rates to leading companies that added up to a much larger subsidy than outlays to poor families, the ‘Bolsa Empresarial’ cost the treasury about double the Bolsa Família. Favourable to large commodity and ...”

“... and enjoyment.’ Even had Vázquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it. Nor do I believe the account in James Woodall’s life of Borges, also published in 1996: ‘What happened is a matter for speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable ...”

“... at first to distinguish from exhaustion: the MPLA keeled over as one blow followed another, then rose slowly to its feet, helped up by the Cubans and applauded by the Soviet Union. The dictatorship​ of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, which was arming and harbouring Unita and the FNLA, was a more serious threat than Alves. A few weeks before the coup, Neto ...”

“... willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side. Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also ...”

“... have been conceived on my father’s 27th birthday, 22 December 1923; my sister was born on 19 June 1927, which is to say that she could well have been conceived on my second birthday. I cannot remember at what age I made these calculations but do remember enjoying the arithmetic of the fact that my mother, born in 1901, had a birthday, 23 March, which ...”