“... riding to Westminster in a golden coach. Nanny lights the fire and sits herself down with a nice cup of tea and yesterday’s Daily Express, but she keeps half an eye on us too, as we bring out our trophies from abroad, the books and pictures we have managed to get past the customs. (Nanny has a pair of scissors handy, to cut out anything it wouldn’t ...”

“... there are still some places where we think weeping out of place. In 2006, Judge Julian Hall, a nice man whom I happened to be at school with, was ridiculed for breaking down in tears after hearing a mother’s tribute to her daughter who’d been killed by a reckless driver. He was further pilloried for the supposedly lenient sentences he passed on several ...”

“... often through quatrain-by-quatrain explication. Now, a vigorous, wry, alert new translation by Richard Sieburth offers English readers the experience of reading them steadily and sequentially, rather than piecemeal, and with the original French on facing pages, making it possible to read the prophecies as acts of writing rather than riddles. Nostradamus ...”

“... ideally generates new headlines at least three or four times a day, especially when there is a nice fast-breaking scandal or moral panic to hammer away at. Politicians don’t feel that the press represents anyone apart from itself, and think it is arrogant and unaccountable, and the press feels the same things about the politicians, and both are right. As ...”

“... light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray happily declared the very attitudes to poetic diction that Wordsworth was later to detect and condemn. ‘The language of the age is never the language of poetry,’ he observed. By which he meant that it never should be. ‘Our poetry ...”

“... which realists see as transparent and sceptics as opaque. In a recent paper, nicely entitled ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, Davidson tries to undermine the notion of languages as entities by developing the notion of what he calls ‘a passing theory’ about the noises and inscriptions presently being produced by a fellow human. Think of such a theory ...”

“... profession. Early so have a chance to look at the occasional paintings, including a couple of nice early 19th-century old masters (of the Butchers’ Company, that is), besides various ceremonial cleavers including the one used to cut up the first New Zealand lamb brought to England and served to Queen Victoria in 1880. Nicest though are two Victorian or ...”

“... was to go to America to work with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable ...”

“... has air-conditioned malls and brigades of smiling, groomed South Asian flunkeys wishing people a nice day. In an area from which the military are banned Kuwaitis shop and drink Turkish coffee and play with their beads under high ceilings. In a crèche where a TV is surrogate mother a lone child plays cat’s-cradle, flanked by two stupefied hotel servitors ...”

“... of one of the most extraordinary lives, in any profession, of this century.’ Holden has a nice line in dry understatement, and knows this is the understatement of the decade. What he means is that he and his fellow-toilers in the biographical olive grove have been racing to make sense of the great heap of myth, obfuscation, blarney and coded ...”

“... occupation and living wage (a black-humoured task dreamt up for my convalescence by the well-named Richard Gott) arrived 22 years late: in 1968 I sent a memorandum to the then editor proposing a daily warts-and-all profile of a man or woman lately dead – in other words, a Not-the-Times obituary column. Now it is universally agreed in the four serious dailies ...”

“... and the character of delusion and delusional states. Without aspiring to the achievement of Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine’s Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, an anthology of psychiatric texts, Porter wants to give a voice to the patient, the sufferer, and especially to those inhabiting a borderland, a borderland of disconnection, of isolation and ...”

“... The Cabin (1992). Mamet doesn’t really believe the theatre is a whore’s profession. He’s a nice Jewish boy, as he tells us. He doesn’t even believe whores are whores: the title is meant to suggest that what looks like a disreputable trade really is a profession, a craft rather than a vice. He quotes a Chicago saying, ‘it isn’t the men, it’s the ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... still dressed in “couture” and the poor struggle along dismal pavements with little but C&A or Richard Shops to sustain them.’ The customers of C&A would surely be surprised to find themselves described as ‘the poor’ and most people expect to go along a pavement to get to the shops. Yet, despite her misplaced sympathy for the huddled masses in ...”