“... owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986. More local in topic, and ...”

“... a Vermeer, the arrangement, roughly, portrait-landscape-portrait-landscape all round this dark, glass-ceilinged room. None of the paintings is shown to advantage, most looking dull and hung so close to each other as to make them difficult to take in on their own. Thus there’s a painting of Philip IV by Velázquez hung ...”

“... will notice. It will be bright and colourful, and instead of beaded curtains there are often big glass windows revealing the flashing lights and winking screens within. Second, some of those flashing lights come from large and sophisticated gaming machines known as Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs). These weren’t around when I worked in a betting ...”

“... club when he was still at Oxford. Anthony Sampson came from Drum magazine in South Africa. Philip Toynbee arrived after his father, the historian Arnold Toynbee, called to wonder if Astor could rescue his son from drink, depression and riotous behaviour. Colin Legum, expelled from his native South Africa, joined the paper after working as a ...”

“... by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to invest, are rumoured to be buying up entire buildings as investment portfolios; many of these gaudy shells, low-ceilinged, tight-balconied, are doomed to remain ...”

“... sharply towards a hard Brexit. And she did so without consulting her cabinet. Her chancellor, Philip Hammond, listened to her declare at the Tory Party Conference in October 2016 that after Brexit, Britain would accept no European laws, would take control of its own immigration policy, would have its own trade deal with the EU and would be outside the ...”

“... the second biggest UK bank after HSBC. Fred Goodwin was something of a hero in the banking world. Philip Delves Broughton, a former Telegraph journalist who went to Harvard to do an MBA and wrote a funny, depressing book about it, What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, reports that in 2003 the school made RBS the subject of one of its famous case ...”