With pardonable exaggeration, Ms Uglow in her introduction credits the Lunar men with nothing less than inventing the modern world.

ECONOMIST: 18th-century science

This may be pardonable in a commerce secretary.

ECONOMIST: The second term: Shock and awe, continued | The

There is no doubt, however, that his favored stalking ground is Europe, East and West, and that the era that most consistently arouses his imagination, and to which, with a twinge of pardonable nostalgia, he occasionally harks back, is the Cold War.

NEWYORKER: I Spy