The wooden bench under me was four stout legs glued to a butcherblock slab.

The algorithm then recurses on the children of the current tree node.

The development of the science of political parties (it could perhaps be called stasiology).

Think of banking today and the image is of grey-suited men in towering skyscrapers. Its future, however, is being shaped in converted warehouses and funky offices in San Francisco, New York and London, where bright young things in jeans and T-shirts huddle around laptops, sipping lattes or munching on free food.