“... 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 ...”

“... for an Oscar for Crossfire, played a young singer (though she didn’t sing herself). By 1 June, when Ray and Grahame married in Las Vegas, she was four months pregnant with their son Tim. When Bogart bought the rights to Hughes’s novel, he imagined Lauren Bacall for the role of Laurel Gray. The couple had already made four films together –To Have ...”

“... to take advantage of his having fallen from favour with the king. Of Cromwell’s arrest in early June we have a second-hand account by the French ambassador. Informed by the captain of the king’s guard that he was a prisoner, he ‘ripped his cap from his head and threw it to the ground in contempt, saying to the Duke of Norfolk and others of the Privy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she had the idea for the story as she was pushing her daughter’s stroller up a hill one sunny June morning; she typed it out when she got home, and three weeks later (still June, still sunny), it was published almost unchanged in the New Yorker. There are other tales like this. Once she left in the middle of a game of ...”

“... shells made the old tactics of ramming and boarding obsolete, though Howe on the Glorious First of June was still reckoning on a firing range of no more than twenty feet and Nelson himself led one of the boarding parties that seized the San Nicolas, probably the first flag officer to do so since Sir Edward Howard in ...”

“... At the centre of the book is an extraordinary adventure when in the early hours of Monday, 9 June 1941 the pilot of an RAF Whitley bomber returning from a raid over Dortmund got lost crossing the Pennines and, running out of fuel, had to make an emergency landing. Though it was the height of summer and should have been quite light, there was fog and ...”

“... The diarist Harry Kessler put the same point differently, after meeting him in Paris in June 1907: ‘He looks like a distinguished grandfather, or rather the face is that of a man of the world – but the eye – the eye is that of an apostle untouched by the world.’ By this time Degas had become, as Valéry put it, ‘ever more ...”

“... course of justice – the trial was described in Ronan Bennett’s ‘Criminal Justice’ (LRB, 24 June) which also raised the question of the trial of the West Midlands policemen.* As solicitor to Patrick Armstrong, one of the Guildford Four, since his arrest in 1974, I am very concerned about the way in which the trial of the three Surrey officers was ...”

“... the Berry family’s balls to Black on a silver platter.’ The deal was signed on 13 June 1985. By 11 December, Black had full control of the Telegraph, for a total cost of £30 million. There are two stories of what happened next. One is the external story, the one the world saw. Black appointed Max Hastings to run the Telegraph, and was able ...”

“... leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in ...”

“... the red of carnations and the sharp fresh green of the alchemilla light up the room. 13 June. At supper Alec Guinness tells a curious story apropos of a BBC documentary on Anthony Eden last night. In prewar days Eden used to see a good deal of the theatre director Glen Byam Shaw and when he was contemplating resignation over Abyssinia in 1938 he ...”

“... they instead inhale the anonymous yet fiercely intimate odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone Else’s War (2003), has information to gather. He makes a call. ‘The phone booth smelled of urine; someone had spat generously on the floor and a loud argument in Cantonese was going on at the stamp ...”

“... second queen, her role was so far behind the scenes that it has left no trace. But in late June she was back at court by the side of Queen Jane, and the king was looking forward to an era of peace and fertility. At this point, Reginald delivered him a nasty surprise, in the shape of a letter denouncing him as a schismatic, heretic and disgrace to ...”