The bane of Britain’s great and powerful is a couple of inches long, has warty skin and a bright orange underbelly—and the power to disrupt some of their most heartfelt ambitions.
'Britain's great and powerful' seems to mean 'Britain's great people and powerful people'. How can I understand the usage grammatically? Can you use an adjective without following noun?
It is possible to use an adjective such as "powerful" to mean "powerful ones" or "powerful people". You can talk about "the poor" or "the rich", for example to mean "poor people" or "rich people".
So "great and powerful" means "great and powerful people", and "Britain's great and powerful" means "those British people who are great and powerful".
This conversion of an adjective to a noun depends on the right context. It isn't always idiomatic. In particular it is not idiomatic to talk about "a great an powerful". The adjective as a noun refers to the collective of all people, not a single person. So you would use plural agreement. "The rich are getting fatter."
