Rob Sheffield

Having a Congress with a more diverse educational and professional background would serve the country well. And given the budget challenges facing America today, we might benefit from a few more cold, calculating problem solvers, and fewer courtroom impresarios.

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.

It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.