“... oversight. But the crimes of Global Crossing and Qwest are peccadillos compared with the grand larceny carried out by WorldCom, which has effectively rewritten the book on corporate fraud. At the most recent count WorldCom had overstated its earnings between 1999 and 2001 by some $9 billion. It accomplished this largely (though not entirely) through ...”

“... aviatsii,’ the driver said. ‘We don’t have the air power.’The Ukrainian House, a grand late 20th-century building between a palace and a shrine in appearance, faced and lined with white marble, has a large open ground floor and circular galleries rising up, Guggenheim-style, though separate and connected by stairs rather than a single ...”

“... and seems a trifle embarrassed now, surrounded by a dozen neat neo-Georgian family homes. Too grand and expansive for its surroundings, the cedar is humiliated by its size, an arboreal Gulliver towering above the Lilliputian privet and suburban forsythia.When I was a young boy, however, this rather spiritless village had one wonderful compensation. Have ...”

“... the flat where he lived affected his breathing.Rochdale was also one of the places it’s thought David Cameron had in mind in 2016 when he launched his attack on ‘sink estates’, as if bad architecture, rather than multigenerational deprivation, was the root cause of council estate problems. The Rochdale estates in question were badly in need of ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”

“... asked by the Foreign Office to become the United Kingdom’s special representative on Cyprus. Sir David – now Lord – Hannay, who began his career in Iran and Afghanistan, was Britain’s foremost European diplomat, with some thirty years of involvement in EU affairs behind him. His summons came from Jeremy Greenstock, soon to become famous for his ...”

“... response was to modify the charge in the penal code under which Dink had been prosecuted, with a grand alteration from ‘denigrating Turkishness’ to ‘denigrating the Turkish nation’. Twenty-four hours after that change had been made, on May Day 2008, police launched an all-out assault on workers attempting to commemorate the killing of trade unionists ...”

“... population over the million mark. There’s a lot of accumulated wealth in its pretty villages and grand manor houses. Five hunts – the Atherstone, the Belvoir, the Cottesmore, the Quorn and the Fernie – still go through the motions of chasing foxes within the bounds of the law. In bleaker districts of small post-industrial towns like Coalville and ...”