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“... see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets were better over ...”

“... tide and looked down on her red brick terrace.One evening in early December 2013 Waters was at home, feeling she’d bested the Christmas run-in. The holiday food was bought and she’d steam-cleaned the carpets. There’d been a story about east coast tidal storms on the TV that morning, but she didn’t follow the forecast closely and didn’t think of ...”

“... days of the black market were still making it possible for my father to bring plenty of money home, and the remains of the jewellery my mother had from her first husband were sold off to keep her feeling wealthy when the black market came to an end. For the first three years of my life, my mother’s desperate need to display wealth was taken care of. Of ...”

“... folders Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He fixed me with an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they said, “We’re going to privatise the ...”

“... failures. Though Bolkestein was well-read and, compared with the norms of the Dutch elite, at home with ideas, he was not, as he confessed, really an intellectual, more of ‘a politician and pamphleteer’. By background a businessman, and not a dedicated ideologue like Powell, he lacked the latter’s scholarly and poetaster side, and was not a ...”

“... at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; postwar triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the ...”