He might have been the business when it came to knocking the bollocks out of little babies, but fronted up by a real man that gutless coward went to pieces and buggered off without arguing.

Many of the bedrock assumptions of American culture — about work, progress, fairness and optimism — are being shaken as successive generations worry about the prospect of declining living standards.

How greatly the word will is felt to have lost presentive power in the last three centuries.

Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.