“... moment in this narrative was Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, issued in Berlin in June 1987: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ One could hardly imagine a tale more flattering to Americans’ nationalist narcissism, or more fitting to the unipolar moment when Madeleine Albright anointed the United States as ‘the indispensable ...”

“... much younger and more secularised Jewish writers than Singer seemed too submerged in what Gillian Rose in her scathing essay on Schindler’s List called ‘Holocaust Piety’. In a review in the LRB (23 June 2005) of The History of Love, a novel by Nicole Krauss set in Israel, Europe and the US, James Wood pointed out ...”

“... at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, safely delivered as the fifth largest country in Europe, June 1920. The second is Donald Robin Slomnicki, in a small town near Bucharest on 3 February 1931. Father, Joseph Slomnicki, of Polish-Russian Jewish parentage, naturalised British; mother, Elena Slomnicki, née Hotz, Austrian-German-Swiss, not ...”

“... At the end of June 1915, T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, both 27 years old, were married in a London register office. They had been introduced less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy ...”

“... when Wilde entered the Hogarth Club ‘an old member of the club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the door. One or two other members also got up. Everyone felt uncomfortable.’ In January 1891, six months after the magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and three months before it came out in book form, Constance ...”

“... will escape the slaughter. Few of their social class stay in Fall River in the sweating months of June, July and August but, then, few of their social class live on Second Street, in the low part of town where heat gathers like fog. Lizzie was invited away, too, to a summer house by the sea to join a merry band of girls but, as if on purpose to mortify her ...”

“... 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 ...”