“... is seven billion. Two and a half billion adults don’t have a bank account. Paul Vigna and Michael Casey’s excellent book Cryptocurrency explains what that means:3 Somewhere in the order of five billion people belong to the households that are cut off from a financial system that the rest of us take for granted. They can’t start savings ...”

“... language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the ...”

“... whole, and his good fortune now extends beyond the grave in the shape of this excellent biography. Michael Braddick is himself a distinguished historian of 17th-century England, the period that was the focus of practically all of Hill’s copious writings, and he is especially well versed in the debates surrounding the causes and character of the English Civil ...”

“... are Brigade officers. John Springhall and Brian Fraser have collaborated on the British chapters; Michael Hoare has written the chapters on the movement overseas. The Brigade has shown an admirable willingness – by no means common among voluntary bodies – to give its historians free access to its archives, and to leave them to draw their own ...”

“... that 36 per cent of mammography facilities were producing images of unacceptable quality. Maureen Roberts, who led the Edinburgh Breast Cancer Screening Project until she herself died from the disease in 1989, wrote in an article published after her death that ‘we can no longer ignore the possibility that screening may not reduce mortality in women of any ...”

“... off the companies – a strategy perfected in the 1980s by such outfits as KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), Carlyle and Blackstone.Abraaj was soon a major player in parts of the world that are problematically described as ‘emerging’ or ‘frontier’ markets. It bought out Aramex (a Jordanian courier firm), Karachi Electric (a utility company) and ...”

“... all the justices save Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fact that John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are all Catholic may speak to the idea of diversity and variety within the Church, but it also shows how little Catholics in America have in common with one ...”

“... powers to set the house in order. His preferred candidate for the role was Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Antonius Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See. The back-up, in case Habsburg proved unavailable, was the commander of the Pontifical Swiss Guard.As an analyst of the modern administrative ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... by being called Buttercup and not being a cow. It also has a character called the Dread Pirate Roberts, which is not just deliberately wrong (we all know pirates have names that suggest facial hair or booty) but wrong in being hereditary, like ‘caesar’. We discover that previous Dread Pirate Robertses have included a man originally called Ryan, who ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... inaugural address carried the stamp of hot ambition even in its salutation: ‘Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.’ What were the people of the world doing here? It has been conjectured that Trump was greeting a blood-brotherhood of populari ...”

“... he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s biggest philanthropist. He has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into schools, universities and churches. In recent months I have spoken to more ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... in nothing else, Margaret Thatcher may have been rather similar to Wilson. During the war, the Roberts household naturally talked a great deal about Germany. The young Margaret, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘knew just what I thought of Hitler’, and she was intensely proud of the British Empire. According to Sir Charles Powell, probably the most ...”