“... harder,’ Newsweek wrote of Sparks in August 1953, shortly after he’d moved to NEA, the Scripps Howard wire service. When he learned of his Pulitzer – in 1951, for articles describing the Stalinisation of East Germany – he was covering a Chinese artillery barrage in Korea.Sparks didn’t write in the Olympian tones of Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann ...”

“... as young drunks somewhere make their presence felt and kick out against this oppressive idyll. 1 June. When Jeremy Sams directed Wind in the Willows in Tokyo he had many practical problems, chief of which being that the actors did not trouble to make themselves heard. He was well into rehearsals before he found out that this was because they were all ...”

“... hidden’ for almost seventy years. Tawadros was said to have sold the stele just a decade after Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and just eight years after he revealed the gold funerary mask. These were global events. Audiences in both Cairo and London were enthralled by the excavation. The Times managed to secure an exclusive deal for press ...”

“... premiere of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and be home in time for tea.) He tried it in the studio on 9 June 1964, during the legendary all-night session when he recorded the whole of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Two takes survive, with Greenwich Village folkie Ramblin’ Jack Elliott putting some harmonies over the chorus, but it wasn’t good enough to go on that ...”

“... mess was a house next to a dunghill. He spent six months on the Western Front with his pilot, Howard Redmayne Harker, and qualified as an observer. Harker, coincidentally, was Fernald’s mother’s maiden name and the two became close. (Harker died seven months after Fernald, of pneumonia.) There is a picture of them looking splendid, not quite ...”

“... the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading relations. The ...”

“... home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the Harewood estate, home these days to ...”

“... got: ‘a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love’. Plath and Hughes were married on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr in London, less than four months after they met at the St Botolph’s Review launch party at Falcon Yard in Cambridge. (You can watch Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig attempt to re- create this clash of violence, cheek-biting and ...”

“... he passed it on to Rachel, his sister, who died; she in turn infected his mother, and in June 1874 Kate, too, died. Within two years, Countess Russell had lost a grandchild and a daughter-in-law, and had seen one son go mad and another incapacitated for work. Her daughter Agatha had some years earlier had a delusional collapse when she became engaged ...”

“... The ‘raft of laws’ of which he now disapproves seems to have emanated exclusively from Michael Howard, when the Government was already on its last legs. Alexander’s book is a compelling account of what the powerful in our society now mean by democracy; his is the authentic voice of post-democratic liberalism and his version of democracy both mirrors and ...”

“... interview with Simone Biles before she became a household name. The veteran reporter interviewed Howard Schultz at Starbucks headquarters. Ozy’s video stories were terrific but there were never enough of them to convince Watson that the video team wasn’t malingering. At its best, Ozy was clever, original. I managed a handful of stories I remember with ...”

“... stay-down miners, Left Book Clubbers, black-coffin bearers, China campaigners, India Leaguers, Howard Leaguers, associates of Artists International, International Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first ...”

“... truth that seemed to pervade society.’ As so often, war began in confusion and inadvertence. In June 1853, having made demands on the Porte which were designed to be rejected, Russia attacked the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Nicholas’s worst miscalculation was his assumption that Austria would support him. Only a few years had passed since ...”

“... grassroots organiser, and brought it into the age of the internet – a force first recognised by Howard Dean in his unsuccessful 2004 campaign. Combining the ‘50 state strategy’ that Dean, as the head of the Democratic National Committee, had devised (to the absolute derision of the Clintonistas) with the decentralised nature of the web, Obama realised ...”

“... capacities as think-tank director, Daily Telegraph leader-writer and speechwriter for Michael Howard, he has been agitating against the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU throughout the 25 years since he was a student politician at Oxford. As an MEP he helped persuade David Cameron to withdraw the Tories from the conservative-liberal mainstream in ...”