The newest Ferrari of them all, the 458, the Italia. The GT3 was good, but nowhen near as good as this... almost nothing on Earth is as good as this.… - Jeremy Clarkson

You get the picture. And so did BMW. When they bought the company they could have fitted a new body to one of their 7 Series. That's what Mercedes did to create the Maybach. But instead of wandering around the BMW spare-parts division saying, "What do we want?" the engineers fired up their computers and asked, "What do we need?". Plainly they looked at what Henry Royce and Charles Rolls were trying to achieve a hundred years ago, and thought, "Zis is vot ve must do also." And as a result the Rolls-Royce Phantom is quite simply the best car in the world.

The first thing that will strike you as odd in Japan is how polite everyone is. Quite apart from the neverending bowing, they have obsequiousness down to an art that even the Chinese haven't mastered.

[I]sn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America. ... Britain, on its own, has little influence on the world stage. I think we are all agreed on that. But Europe if it were well run and had good cohesive, well thought-out policies, would be a tremendous force for good.