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“... and wild-westish the process became, take a look at a book by a former Texas mortgage broker, Richard Bitner, called Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender.† The invention which made it possible for the lending to become so reckless was securitisation: the process by which loans were added together and sold on to other institutions as packages of debt. This ...”

“... energy left in it, the Princess of Wales timed her exit impeccably. It is tempting to think that Richard Branson also understood, if only unconsciously, that public adulation is likely to tire and turn into its own opposite. Blonde, blue-eyed, apparently artless – like the Princess – he took what seemed to be life-threatening risks by boat and ...”

“... he had tried to sell a painting for a year or so he would tell me that I could have it for the price of the canvas and frame, usually one to three pounds. I could not always manage it, for my salary was under £250 a year; not much to maintain a family in London. Many he would give me, and now that Kettle’s Yard has been catalogued I find it has 44 works ...”

“... a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been brought up in a similarly boxy little house in a similarly depressing part of Haywards Heath by his single teacher mother. Although his family was much better educated than mine, it was still trapped in the same sort of grim lower echelons of the ...”

“... the sceptic. The analysis of knowledge has been designed so that foregoing the latter is the price of enjoying the former. To this we can imagine the existentially intense layman replying: ‘I thought you were promising an explanation of how knowledge is possible – how I, a poor little animal on an insignificant planet, a mere swirl of quarks, can ...”

“... gas-guzzlers. When economic crisis hit the country in the 1980s, the manufacturers cut the price of the car by 20 per cent, opening it up to a new market. It became the vehicle of choice for taxi-drivers. The vochito appealed not only to petit-bourgeois ideals of reliability and sobriety but also to Mexican national pride: manufactured in Mexico by ...”

“... hardly be rescued. With this, we would lose our raw materials basis. That must not happen at any price. Therefore: further support.’ The problem was that the intervention was extremely expensive. Germany, which was desperately short of foreign currency, was spending huge sums of money supporting the Nationalists. The Nazi regime was trying to make Germany ...”

“... hard to trace: in Paraguay they are crystal clear. Everyone is on the take and everything has its price. This is especially the case when it comes to voting. An acquaintance told me of a scam in his own neighbourhood in Asunción during the primary elections in the ruling Colorado Party. His uncle, who was in charge of a local precinct and had ten voters in ...”

“... it was they were killing’. Before acknowledging that ‘every drone strike is an execution,’ Richard Blee, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden-hunting unit, told Mazzetti that the CIA lowered the bar for identifying targets because American spies no longer ‘wanted to know who we were killing before anyone pulled the trigger’. They no longer ...”

“... for taxes is the quasi-Hobbesian one succinctly expressed in the early 19th century by Richard Whately, an archbishop who moonlighted as a philosopher and political economist, when he defined taxation as ‘the revenue levied from the subject in return for the protection afforded by the Sovereign’. On this understanding, taxation is a kind of ...”

“... year in power, Gorbachev was presiding over a full-scale crash, whose causes are well described by Richard Ericson in an essay on the contemporary Russian economy in After the Soviet Union: Perestroika dictated the monetisation of transactions (that is, contractual buying and selling for a profit) without allowing the rouble to become real money or prices to ...”

“... Puritans, Cromwell’s yeomen, Wilkesite rioters, Paineite radicals and trade unionists’. What Price Liberty? is an erudite, eminently readable account of British liberties from the Stuart monarchy to multiculturalism, written in the conviction that as a society we have ‘lost the means to talk about liberty’ and need urgently to rediscover it. Liberty ...”

“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert was the ...”

“... results that nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper all the rest. Visiting kings, like Richard and Philip II of France, bickered about precedence; the Christian nobility in Palestine fought each other for the increasingly enfeebled crown of Jerusalem; above all, Crusaders fresh from Europe, with all the bigoted ignorance of their modern successors ...”