Direct Line is part of the RBS Insurance division of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group that specialises in selling insurance and other financial services over the phone and internet.

It was the first telephone insurer in the UK when launched in 1985 by founder Peter Wood, and soon became the UK's largest provider of motor vehicle insurance. Its head office is located in Croydon, but the company also has offices in Glasgow, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. Overseas, the division has expanded into Spain (Línea Directa), Japan (in partnership with Yasuda Life),Germany, and Italy.

Direct Line was effectively nationalised alongside RBS in November 2008 during the banking crisis, due to the financial crisis, and RBS's dependency on UK taxpayers' money.

Direct Line is well known in the UK for its distinctive logo - a red telephone on wheels - which is used extensively in its marketing. In recent years the phone has been joined by a mouse to reflect online purchasing habits.

Between 2009 and 2010, the phone and mouse appeared together in TV campaigns with Stephen Fry providing the voice of the phone and Paul Merton as the mouse.

Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.

After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.

He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.

As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.

Paul Merton (born Paul James Martin; 9 July 1957) is a British comedian, writer, actor and television presenter. Known for his improvisation skill, his humour is rooted in deadpan, surreal and sometimes dark comedy. Considered by a number of critics, fellow comedians and members of the public to be among Britain's greatest comedians, he is well known for his regular appearances as a team captain on the BBC panel game Have I Got News for You, and as the former host of Room 101. He has also appeared as a regular panellist on Radio 4's Just a Minute and as one of Comedy Store's Comedy Store Players.

Merton was born on 9 July 1957 in Parsons Green, London to an English father (a train guard on the London Underground) and an Irish Roman Catholic mother. When his mother returned to work as a nurse, Merton and his younger sister were looked after by their grandfather, who lived with them in their council flat in Mitcham, South London.^{[citation needed]}

He failed his eleven plus and went on to Wimbledon College, a Jesuit-run secondary school that had just become a comprehensive, where he received A-levels in English and History. His experience of victimisation there as a working-class boy became a frequent subject of his comedy.^{[citation needed]} After leaving school, Merton worked at the Tooting employment office for seven years.

Earl Nightingale (March 12, 1921 – March 28, 1989) was an American motivational speaker and author, known as the "Dean of Personal Development." He was the voice in the early 1950s of Sky King, the hero of a radio adventure series, and was a WGN radio show host from 1950 to 1956. Nightingale was the author of the Strangest Secret, which economist Terry Savage has called “…One of the great motivational books of all time“.

When Nightingale was seventeen he joined the United States Marines. He was on the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor and was one of twelve surviving Marines on board that day. Before being mustered, Nightingale was an instructor at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

After the war Nightingale began work in the radio industry, which eventually led to work as a motivational speaker. In the fall of 1949, Nightingale was inspired while reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Quoting from the Earl Nightingale official website: "When he was 29, Earl's enlightenment had come to him as a bolt out of the blue while reading, 'Think and Grow Rich'. It came when he realized that the six words he read were the answer to the question he had been looking for! That, 'we become what we think about'. He realized that he had been reading the same truth over and over again, from the New Testament...to the works of Emerson. 'We become what we think about.' 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap...'" In 1956 he produced a spoken word record, The Strangest Secret, which sold over a million copies, making it the first spoken-word recording to achieve Gold Record status. In 1960, a condensed audio version of Think and Grow Rich was narrated by Nightingale. It was titled Think and Grow Rich: The Essence Of The Immortal Book By Napoleon Hill, Narrated by Earl Nightingale, produced by Success Motivation Institute. Also in 1960, he cofounded the Nightingale-Conant corporation with Lloyd Conant.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин; IPA: [vɫɐˈdʲimʲɪr vɫɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ ˈputʲɪn] ( listen); born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician who has been the President of Russia since 7 May 2012. Putin previously served as President from 2000 to 2008 and as Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000, and again from 2008 to 2012. Putin also serves as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when president Boris Yeltsin resigned in a surprising move. Putin won the 2000 presidential election; in 2004 he was re-elected for a second term lasting until 7 May 2008.

Because of constitutionally mandated term limits, Putin was ineligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term. After his successor Dmitry Medvedev won the 2008 presidential election, Putin was nominated by Medvedev to be Russia's Prime Minister; Putin took office on 8 May 2008 and a period of so-called "tandemocracy" followed. In September 2011, Putin and Medvedev agreed he should seek a third, non-consecutive term in the 2012 presidential election, which he won in the first round on 4 March 2012.