Gladstone, a formidable reformer, personified an era when the British Empire was the great world power.
All a far cry from when the British Art Show was last in Glasgow in 1990.
When the British government stepped in to rescue RBS, Sir Fred had to fall on his sword.
When the British colonised Aden, 880km (550 miles) to the west, they paid scant attention to Socotra.
They howled when the British, German and French leaders staged a three-way summit in Berlin in February.
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However, when the British came into India, to Varanasi and up the Ganges, they brought products from their mills.
When the British government offered them money to experiment with pay-as-you-throw schemes earlier this year, not one signed up.
He said Hamid had been in the fields studying for a physics exam when the British attack was launched.
But when the British withdrew in 1956, in their haste to leave, they placed the south under Arab rule.
When the British empire was being dismantled it was unsure what to do with its dozens of small islands like Antigua.
When the British Prime Minister got together with Continental leaders, Mr Amis wondered, was this topic part of "the European conversation"?
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Mr. Stoppard, 75, first read "Parade's End" in 2008, when the British production company Mammoth Screen asked him to write the adaptation.
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Like Abdul, his biggest concern is what happens when the British leave.
But when the British tried to forge a union out of the two Rhodesias, now Zambia and Zimbabwe, and Nyasaland, he turned radical.
Nigeria has long campaigned for the return of artefacts stolen when the British took over the kingdom of Benin, now southern Nigeria, in 1897.
The country of 164 million came into being seven years later, when the British left the Indian sub-continent, partitioning it into India and Pakistan.
When the British won a battle, investors anticipated the day that the government would stop issuing new bonds and turn to buying old ones via the sinking fund.
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The situation was exacerbated the British general election when the British National Party won 16 percent of the vote in one Oldham constituency and 11 percent in another.
The same thing happened when the British government tried, and failed, to get the boss of the ruined Royal Bank of Scotland to surrender part of his pension.
Between the world wars, when the British Empire held sway over the subcontinent, adventurers came from far and wide to map the region's valleys and scale its highest summits.
In no year since 1992, when the British Crime Survey first included the question, has a majority of people believed that crime has fallen or even remained the same.
We should be very careful, at a time when the British economy is still recovering from the worst economic shock in a generation, to create a prolonged period of uncertainty.
When the British journal asked its scientifically aware readers earlier this year, one in five of those who answered said they had used such drugs non-medically, to help them concentrate or learn.
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All this is particularly worrying at a time when the British economy is finally slowing, its housing market subsiding and over-indebted consumers beginning to stagger under the weight of their mortgages and overdrafts.
It will thrash out problems caused when the British government takes a decision which affects something which is the assemblies' responsibility, and will discuss the treatment of devolved matters in different parts of Britain.
The Indians believe they should deal with Canada on a government-to-government basis, just as their ancestors did in the 1700s, when the British bought peace in the colony by signing treaties guaranteeing Indian rights to land and self-government.
And when the British were about to leave here after the Second World War, they gave the impression to these people who had been loyal to the British Empire that they could have independence for their separate areas.
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The dispute between Britain and Ecuador exploded when the British Foreign Office, in a letter to Ecuadorian officials, cited a little known law that could temporarily suspend the embassy's diplomatic protection and allow authorities to enter and arrest Assange.
Another part of the Agreement will be implemented on Friday when the British Irish Council and British Irish Inter-Governmental Conference are established linking the administrations in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
Indeed there is little evidence that the public across Europe wants political union - but the urging of greater fiscal union surely brings closer the day when the British will want to debate their future in a changed Europe.
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