“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte – currently Sarkozy’s diplomatic adviser – gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney wanted, without returning to the Security Council for the second explicit authorisation to attack that Blair wanted, which would force France to ...”

“... Angela knew Anthony and Ann when they first met. ‘He had a huge picture of the singer George Michael above his bed,’ said Angela. ‘Everybody teased him about it, but he said: “One day I’ll be famous like him.”’ Angela was wearing huge hooped earrings and slippers covered in hearts. Whenever she got excited she kicked an Argos catalogue that ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”

“... its local functionaries dismissing it as ‘meaningless’. But in the shepherd of the referendum, Michael Mouskos, it had met with more than it reckoned. Five months later, he was elected head of the church, at the age of 37, as Archbishop Makarios III. Son of a goatherd, he had gone from a seminary in Cyprus to university in Athens and postgraduate studies ...”

“... in the world, which came into force on 26 January 1950. The document drew on British, American and White Dominion precedents for an original synthesis, combining a strong central executive with a symbolic presidency, a bicameral legislature with reserved seats for minorities, a Supreme Court with robust provincial governments, in a semi-federal structure ...”