“... consequences of the two explanations would be very sharply divergent, and it would be nice to know which, if either, is true. On the debate on Puritanism and social control, Dr McIntosh sides with Margaret Spulford, rather than with Keith Wrightson. She has found a rapid growth in concern with sexual misbehaviour, drinking and gaming in the later ...”

“... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in this way, Chamberlain was able to raise ‘news management’, in the words of the historian Richard Cockett, ‘almost to the level of an exact science’. Obviously, it’s a long march from making Lord Halifax look like an appeaser (which Harris might have pointed out he was already) to making Michael Heseltine look like a fool or a knave, which ...”

“... explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or on the contrary a true and valid account of the way things are. Whenever such matters are dealt with in science books, the Kuhnian view reigns supreme: the view that a scientific theory is essentially ...”

“... boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware of always being obliged to say the unsayable, but the pose didn’t seem too strenuous to keep up. Anyway, it often wasn’t a pose, as I came to appreciate when we ...”