“... claim – ‘instead of a state, we got a ministry in charge of garbage disposal’ – but the ball is now in the world’s court to recognise Palestine as a state. Abbas’s plan to make his declaration in September is a gamble. Fayyad has long questioned the tactical wisdom of declaring statehood unilaterally while the occupation remains deeply ...”

“... Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell Pearce, embody the tensions in ...”

“... rolled from France into a depression over southern England and all but locked into place, like a ball in a cup. When the thick clouds in this air mass burst, they dumped extraordinary intensities of rain. It rained most ferociously on and around the Cotswolds. On Friday afternoon, Pershore, just north of Tewkesbury, was experiencing ten millimetres of rain ...”

“... I asked him to tell me about his family history a glint appeared in Jim’s eye. ‘My grandfather George was born in 1860,’ he said, ‘and he worked as a butcher and a restaurant owner up in London, near St Paul’s. My father was Arch Fordham and he started a farm in Berkshire, but my mother, Elsie, who was born in 1901, her family was called ...”

“... Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Sturt Marten, was a goddaughter of the Queen Mother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran stories about the once carefree aristocrat who had grown up on the £34 million Crichel Estate in Dorset but had suddenly cut off all contact with her family ...”

“... but looks younger, with a dot of a beard and an elegant green linen V-neck. Rod Read, Legay’s George Best lookalike vocalist, and Legay Rogers, the original drummer, have died of cancer, but there’s not much wrong with John Knapp. The unexpected, for him, is not just that he’s alive, or that he’s not in the least bit frail at 69, and doesn’t ...”

“... another such episode. ‘We were all fearing the worst, but Pat managed to catch her like a rugby ball tucked in his chest and he just clung on to her. She had a pink dressing gown on.’ The paper had photographs to accompany the story, purporting to be of ‘Pat’ and the ‘dropped tot’; in fact the man was Oluwaseun Talabi, the man from the 14th floor ...”