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“... the Italian state built a port on a pharaonic scale to supply coal and iron ore for a giant steel mill. The steel mill was never built and the port lay idle for years until enterprising northerners equipped it to handle containers. Gioia Tauro soon became the largest container port in the Mediterranean and the largest ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... of Fiction (1921). Having studied this ultra-Jamesian tract, the bright young Gerald Mills and John Boon determined that ‘viewpoint’ was the main ingredient in narrative and that their romances ‘should always be written from the heroine’s point of view, in order to promote identification and increase interest and suspense’. The ...”

“... 16th and early 17th-century lace ruffs and cuffs, an early 17th-century pike officer’s steel breastplate, a pair of mid-17th-century buff leather gauntlets, and so on – all signifiers of wealth and gentle status.The earliest miniatures – or limnings, as they tended to be called in Britain before the mid-17th century – were done in ...”

“... he took hold of my ear. I stood in the corner near the insect case, remembering my bike. I had the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in my pocket: glass paper, rubber solution, patches, chalk and grater, spare valves. I was ‘riding dead’ – freewheeling downhill with my arms folded and my eyes shut, looking Mr Ray in the eye. Every time I looked round he ...”

“... a brilliant marketer of soap are more likely to colour his interest in art than those of, say, a steel tycoon. Lever had a sense of what people want, and our wants are rarely as practical as a bald description suggests. We want clean clothes, but within that simple desire lie images of crisp starching, of linen whiter than white. Advertising suggests ...”

“... language has often in previous collections given the impression of a weight-lifter hurling steel girders and plastic laths around with an equally ferocious virtuosity. Now, down on the farm, it seems exactly equal to the task – as if to tractoring, milking, mucking out, performing these jobs with the wholly effective absence of enthusiasm which for a ...”

“... ignorant, but commercially valued, foreigner: ‘At home on the outskirts of Sheffield, the great steel town of Yorkshire, Mr Norman Pickering kissed his wife and daughter farewell …’ Would Bennett have ventured that (for us) redundant information as to Sheffield’s location and industry? But Bennett, of course, was a best-seller of a previous era and 80 ...”

“... London, by a series of comic misadventures, Suzuki (who is blessed with a penis hard as Mitsubishi steel) ends up in bed with a string of luscious Englishwomen and earns himself a ton of money through shady city deals which he innocently facilitates. An accomplished martial artist, he thumps sundry skinheads and other home-grown oafs on his progress through ...”

“... but now he spoke of profit and success. He spoke of the need to replace old industries like steel and coal, to cease to support failing enterprises, to face up to the realities of competition, to make France an assertive and efficient economic power rather than one which was liable to decline in a world where the economically feeble were condemned. The ...”

“... it, with whatever substance comes to hand.Motherwell, Deborah’s home town, became a centre of steel production in the 1870s, and at its peak, in the 1960s and 1970s, the works at Ravenscraig employed as many as 13,000 men. Deborah’s father, John, was a miner’s son and left school at 14 to work at Colvilles, the mill ...”

“... he supported him generously through Oxford and paid his considerable debts. Furthermore, although John Nichols, a womanising Edwardian dandy, was the antithesis of his homosexual son, they didn’t get on too badly. John was even proud of Beverley’s early achievements and advised him sensibly on those initially amateur ...”

“... Everyone remembers what they were doing when John Kennedy was killed, but no one even asks what you were doing when Gerald Ford was President. The wonderfully comic, deviously historical premise of John Updike’s new novel is that someone asks. The someone is the plausible-sounding Northern New England Association of American Historians, and the person asked is one Alfred L ...”

“... would-be Indian industrialists like the Tata family were repeatedly baulked from setting up steel mills or digging coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor ...”

“... and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”