“... loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be ‘a Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of the eight Supreme ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... which I find the most attractive of flowers. Aconites, snug and tight-budded in their cosy green frills, always cheer me up, much more than the ragged and anaemic snowdrops, of which we have a profusion.14 February, Yorkshire. When we had the central heating overhauled a slightly larger radiator was put in the downstairs loo. It’s a small room ...”

“... nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election ...”

“... for representation they were acknowledging their vice in tacitly paying homage to virtue. In his Green Book, however, Gaddafi scandalised people by his refusal to be a hypocrite: he elevated his rejection of representation into an explicit constitutive principle which he called the State of the Masses. But the real problem was that his new course led Libya ...”

“... to prevent, or make good, the consequences of bad loans and bankruptcy. As for the workforce, Robert Fitzgerald, in his account of the Rowntrees, points out that since ‘business and wealth were viewed by the Quakers as a God-given trust, labour could not be treated as a mere commodity’.In fact, some Quaker industrialists treated workers very ...”

“... of the common good and the unselfishness and ability to administer it’. An Eton teacher, ‘Red Robert’ Birley, had encouraged him to read the Marxist economist Harold Laski and to visit the school’s ‘mission’ in London’s East End, which David had found ‘very useful as it gives me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with members of the middle ...”

“... signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail.Conversation typically comes next as a marker. A quarter of A la recherche is made up of dialogue; a half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Speech in Proust is generally entertaining – it is where ...”

“... long-awaited appearance before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, Special Counsel Robert Mueller seems tired and fragile. He keeps strictly to the content of his report and refuses to answer a few hundred questions that stray into other territories or are still, he claims, the subject of ongoing investigations by others. He stares blankly as ...”

“... on Main Street. The Evergreens was ‘unlike any other’ house in Amherst, kitted out with ‘a green marble fireplace, a mechanical call bell system and an early centralised heating system from the coal-fired furnace’. Mabel was ‘captivated’ by Sue, whom she entertained by playing the ‘beautiful new upright piano’ in the Dickinsons’ drawing ...”

“... in hard times that they agreed. These women were later to seek legal relief, and it was Judge Robert Bork as Federal appellate judge who in 1984 ‘ruled in favour of the company’. It may be that American Cyanamid had expected all its female employees would go away rather than undergo sterilisation, and the protection policy (which offered no ...”

“... could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of preparation,’ May’s deputy, Damian Green, told Tim Shipman. ‘The whole machine went on a journey, and part of that journey was to discover problems that hadn’t been discussed at the time of the referendum.’ The EU, however, was prepared and laid out its timetable for up to two years of ...”

“... Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the five years before Bell got going on the Clyde half a dozen other steamers had begun to carry freight and passengers on the Delaware, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi and ...”

“... COP26 targets and increasing North Sea hydrocarbon production. In the US, while proponents of green energy are calling for an acceleration of investment in renewables, the electric car mogul Elon Musk and oil and gas lobbyists are all demanding swift and dramatic deregulation of drilling offshore and on federal lands. Meanwhile, South African and ...”

“... trouble, he approached Matthews several times. By that time, Matthews had become friendly with Robert MacGregor, the founder and CEO of a Canada-based money-transfer firm called nTrust. Matthews encouraged MacGregor to come to Australia and assess Wright’s value as an investment opportunity. Wright had founded a number of businesses that were in trouble ...”