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“... the civil service after the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death, but returned when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.) Cameron appointed Greensill, who had left Citigroup to start his own firm, as an adviser. He was given a desk in the Cabinet Office and a secure Number Ten email address. In 2014, he was made a UK crown representative and ...”

“... then of the Wall Street Journal, who give his palace manoeuvrings and business dealings the Tina Brown treatment.* MBS is next in line to the throne of Saudi Arabia and already its de facto ruler. He is likely to reign for a very long time. He grew up the much indulged son of King Salman and his controversial third wife, Fahda, whom Salman’s elder children ...”

“... of community and advocacy groups, New York City Council signed up to a plan proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to close Rikers Island by 2026 (later delayed to 2027) and replace it with four new jails, in Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn. These would hold a combined 3300 people – far fewer than the current facilities. Since the plan was ...”

“... of contemporary corporate democracy’. This revolt against the era and ethos of the CBCs (Bill Clinton, Blair, Bush Jr, Brown, Cameron and Hillary Clinton) offered the giddy prospect of ‘a jailbreak from the old order’, filling its supporters with ‘energy and glee’. Barnett respects ‘the audacity of those ...”

“... be dramatic. As he passed through London last October, on his way to solve Africa’s problems, Bill Gates predicted that in ten years every student in the English-speaking world would be able to purchase, for around $400, a tablet-sized device that could access every textbook for every conceivable taught subject. This machine would, of course, be retailed ...”

“... provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we were leaving behind.’ Leaving behind? Come, come Buzz. He was ...”

“... character has been fleshed out in novels, as-told-to memoirs and wistful outsider essays. Black Bill, who appears in the Country Life journalist Ian Niall’s Poacher’s Handbook (1950), is a perfect specimen. He has a black, tousled beard and an over-large jacket and can charm partridges from their roosts with a brass whistle. He also uses raisins to ...”

“... me, I never knew that the lower classes had such white skins’; ‘Gentlemen never wear brown in London.’ (‘It is necessary to admit,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his own fawning Curzon biography, ‘that it required several months of close association with Lord Curzon before even the most well-intentioned observer could wholly rid himself of a ...”

“... They now intend to bring teenagers home forcibly by introducing a Criminal Justice and Police Bill which includes plans to impose fixed penalties for disorderly behaviour in public places and to raise the upper age limit for curfew to 15. A curfew has in fact been in force in relation to the under-tens since the passing of the Crime and Disorder Act ...”

“... the same article, written in 1939, he remembered Wilde’s visits to his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown. Wilde, once more, arrived as one of his own doubles. ‘Mr Wilde was a quiet individual,’ Ford wrote, who came every Saturday, for years, to tea with the writer’s grandfather Ford Madox Brown. Wilde would sit on the ...”

“... something we’ve seen before. Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, to Ted and Mary Brown. Her father was a mining engineer, and her mother, as would be repeated over and over in the stories, was a Moynihan. The family name is significant. We are offered a picture of Lucia sucking worriedly at a bottle, not yet understanding that some days are ...”

“... other things, as a reminder of the attitudes of many in the West to the suffering of black and brown people. Implicitly and explicitly, politicians and commentators have made clear their disparagement, their ignorance, their casual cultural supremacy. ‘This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for ...”

“... Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 ...”

“... UK expelled a few of each other’s diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still waiting. When ...”

“... of the Codex Leicester, the furthest-flung of all Leonardo’s notebooks, bought ten years ago by Bill Gates for a reported $30 million. There have been some pages lost here and there – a light-fingered bibliophile, Count Guglielmo Libri, stole several in the mid 19th century – but these notebooks are essentially as Leonardo left them. Some still have ...”