Compared to their Victorian forebears, today's local administrations lack the powers to govern in the round.
One of the achievements of our spiritual forebears was to embody love.
He was a delicate child, in direct contrast to a strong race of forebears, and inherited from his mother a refined, retiring disposition and a love for books.
There is little in the 18th-century that suggests any immediate forebears.
He said his own forebears had come from central Europe in a previous wave of immigration, no doubt to escape persecution.