Even greater Manchester, now a poster-child for the government's devolution agenda, was until recently a serial devolution failure.
Senior American officials over the Unscom years (1991-98), and famously Madeleine Albright as Bill Clinton's secretary of state, argued openly and with feeling (if unhelpfully at the time) that sanctions on Iraq should not be lifted until Mr Hussein, a serial re-offender, was levered from power.
If there was anyone who could make this work, it is Marcus, who has been a serial entrepreneur until PayPal acquired his mobile payments company Zong a few years ago.
Olivia and Nick quickly extract a confession from Traymore, who was a serial rapist until a car accident severed his spine.
Lord Sainsbury, a serial task-forcer until he became a Labour minister in 1998, is worth £3.1 billion.
In some cases, the person being sketched is not related to the crime at all: a suspicious man near a Brooklyn crime scene, sketched based on witnesses, became the face of a serial killer last year until surveillance video from a subsequent killing emerged.
(d) the boy next door who everyone thought was delightful until he turned out to be a serial killer.
Romola was planned as a serial for Blackwood's, until an offer of £10,000 from The Cornhill Magazine induced George Eliot to desert her old publisher; but rather than divide the book into the 16 installments the editor wanted, she accepted £3,000 less, an evidence of artistic integrity few writers would have shown.
The sera were prepared by centrifugation, labelled individually with a serial number and stored at −20°C until testing.
