“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a giant painted image of Barbra Streisand – one of the billboard signs he manufactures. Walt, a nice, normal guy, flies off to get his brother out of a jam. The disturbed Travis, however, is obstinately mute, and keeps wandering off again whenever Walt leaves him for a moment; the Henderson brothers live in different American worlds. The cosily domestic ...”

“... theft; following the clues should tell you what happened, and then how and why. It’s a nice solution: the writer is the detective, presented with a small group of people he doesn’t know; he has to find out who they are, discover their histories and motives. By the time the story is over, he knows everything. At this point another book might ...”

“... Dewsbury Minster, a church founded in 627, when St Paulinus turned up, is workmanlike. There are nice bits, though. Even near the most troubled estates, there is green stuff. Even near Chickenley, where the 12-year-old girl tried to hang a five-year-old boy in a patch of woods. Many people in Dewsbury think the media overdid it. ‘The press wanted to make ...”

“... fixed their vision, so that the coming instant of death would be held in perpetual abeyance. A nice sense of place gives Binding his frame of reference, so how does he exploit it? How does he shape the chaos that he lets loose? He tells a story. For A Perfect Execution he has one character, a retired hangman, now a publican, yarn to a chess-playing train ...”

“... starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next morning makes this seem less likely, in part because the classic phase of his career ended ...”

“... know what it means: you’ve got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t think it was a frightfully good idea. I was always, as a child, fascinated by things ...”

“... Perhaps the contradiction needs no resolution. My own guess, however, is that Britten wanted to be nice, but found himself being nasty. That in certain kinds of situation his conscious intentions were overridden by inner compulsions which he was too weak to control. That inside the well-meaning, diffident adult there was a prodigious infant clamouring for ...”

“... before Boswell’s), and also the man for whom Johnson invented the word ‘unclubbable’ (a nice way of saying he was a crusty old snob who seldom had a good word for anyone other than himself). Hawkins gave his opinion in a private letter that ‘Francis Barber is an exceedingly worthless fellow,’ and insinuated as much in various comments in his ...”

“... subsequently took their trip through the magic doors, expecting an epiphany. It’s a nice question as to whether Leary or Huxley has destroyed more young brain cells; Huxley has certainly sold more copies.Murray discerns three events as having formed young Aldous’s personality: the premature death of his mother, Julia Huxley (née Arnold), when ...”

“... Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.Now aged 77, the two of them ...”