“... Between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945 the Red Army of Workers and Peasants disposed of ten million German troops, destroyed over six hundred enemy divisions, liberated all of Eastern Europe and finally stormed, unaided, the ‘lair of the fascist beast’, Berlin. This achievement must be considered one of the most extraordinary in military history, for at the outset the Russians were caught completely by surprise and almost completely unprepared ...”

“... Last June, Nasa and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry published a detailed topographic map of the Earth, covering an unprecedented 99 per cent of the planet’s landmass. The map was compiled from data collected from a Japanese radiometer on board an American spacecraft; the elevation measurement points are only 30 metres apart ...”

“... bringing Manning’s work a wider readership. A quarter of a century after her death, Neville and June Braybrooke’s Olivia Manning: A Life provides an opportunity to look at what her reputation is based on. Vicarious tourism is certainly part of it: Manning always glamorised place. She described herself as Anglo-Irish, as if she had been brought up in a ...”

“... have to pay out more, while its revenue from its fixed-rate mortgages stays the same. (As rates rose sharply in the 1980s, almost all the savings and loan associations in the US – the equivalent of the UK’s building societies – were caught out in this way. The resulting crisis, a precursor of today’s credit crunch, pushed more than 700 savings and ...”

“... his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the lines were originally written for the first issue, in June 1960, of the Student Voice, organ of the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee, by its editor Julian Bond, now chair of the NAACP. The Paris exhibition places side by side photographs of Baker and King on the March on Washington.) Baker reappeared at ...”

“... over into music-hall comedy and his finest hour was also his funniest. Here is a glimpse of him in June 1940, wandering in the moonlight among the rose gardens at Number Ten: ‘He was in high spirits, repeating poetry, dilating on the drama of the present situation, maintaining that he and Hitler had only one thing in ...”

“... Irish Studies). The latter has two thousand members, nearly four hundred of whom came to Dublin in June for a special 25th-anniversary session. A new British Association for Irish Studies has entered the fray, as eagerly as if the two countries had only just met. Like ACIS, BAIS can tap ethnic self-awareness: more subterranean and complex than in the ...”

“... year, was a pragmatic one. The match, lauded by Dunbar as the marriage of ‘the Thistle and the Rose’, didn’t mean stable peace let alone a friendship between Tudors and Stewarts that might point to future union. Relations between James and his Tudor in-laws were never smooth, and the maintenance of links with France was both a matter of Scottish pride ...”

“... the first bar-coded item, a packet of Wrigley’s chewing-gum, crossed a scanner in Troy, Ohio, in June 1974. The bar-code reader generates data that computers can use to order new stock in real time. These just-in-time deliveries are seen as a good thing by supermarkets, because they save money. Lawrence doesn’t like them because the supplies come from ...”

“... corrupt air, on the breath of the sick or trapped in soft materials like cloth or wood, so in June 1630 the Sanità stopped the flow of commerce and implemented a cordon sanitaire across the mountain passes of the Apennines. But they soon discovered that the boundary was distressingly permeable. Peasants slipped past bored guards as they played cards. In ...”

“... was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to use as thread bobbins at court. Rebellion spontaneously combusted on nearby estates. The nobility at Stühlingen received 62 complaints relating to abuses ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”

“... by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful Lullabyes There are no firm divisions between objects here, or between objects and non-objects. Tears fall, slumbers ...”

“... of contemporary Spain. She is 37. What’s striking is her witheredness, her brittle grasp of the rose in her hand – a symbol of subservience to her Spanish consort. This is Bloody Mary drained of life, as in Victorian photographs where the subject seems to regard you from beyond the grave. ‘Queen Henrietta Maria’ (1636) by ­Anthony van Dyck When ...”

“... to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog! Writing anonymously, you could be ‘nobody’ precisely because you were ‘somebody’ in the establishment (Dickinson craves the opposite security: to be somebody by truly being nobody). Richmond used ...”