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“... At a canteen​ in Leningrad in December 1941, a man queued for two hours, handed over his ration card, received a bowl of soup and a bowl of porridge, ate the soup and died. A crowd formed around him, not out of concern but in the hope of acquiring extra food. Leningrad under siege was a pitiless place. Two in five people succumbed in the first winter and the streets were littered with corpses ...”

“... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...”

“... In​ the Leeds branch of the West Yorkshire Archive Service, there is a long, narrow notebook with a vellum cover which shows signs of water damage and has peeled away at the top so that it’s possible to make out some of the words on the first page – ‘apricocks’, ‘plombes’ – and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden ...”

“... Streedagh Strand​ is a long curving beach in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. It lies in the shadow of Benbulben, a plateau formed by Ice Age glaciers that is full of the fossils of extinct marine creatures. Out to sea reefs produce mountainous waves. It’s a place where men and their machines seem small. On 21 September 1588, three ships from the Levant squadron of the Spanish Armada were anchored a few miles offshore ...”

“... The Siege of Loyalty House is also a potted social history of the civil wars and how they started. Jessie Childs, a gifted storyteller, begins with an immersive evocation of London: all the sights and smells of the narrow streets, and their sounds: the hawkers’ cries, cartwheels on cobbles, the endless bells. Yet this timeless bustle was about to be ...”