“... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...”

“... conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.A few years ago I saw the Prince of Wales at a public award ceremony. I had ...”

“... to release these documents. This is rather like writing about the Watergate scandal and applauding Richard Nixon’s forthrightness in finally handing over the White House tapes. If the citizens of Hanford are unable to accept what really happened there it wouldn’t be unusual. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Françoise Zonabend’s The Nuclear ...”

“... with the publication of what was advertised as a four-volume ‘complete’ edition in 1938. Richard Church, an editor at Dent, wrote a strongly worded letter to Richardson arguing that a concluded Pilgrimage was absolutely necessary to, indeed was her last chance for, ‘the secure establishment of ... fame’. Richardson, wanting to keep her books in ...”

“... is composed in a language that is joyfully, gratefully taken over from that of Matisses done in Nice between 1919 and 1924: we are reminded of the Odalisque with Magnolias, for instance, even by the way in which the garden in the background is turned into a decorative screen, while the flanking shutters, not at all a Picassian device, are an evocation of ...”

“... Secretary-General of the Arts Council thanks Hall ‘for being public-spirited about Burge’. A nice Note of approbation. But Hall growls in his diary: ‘Public-spirited be damned. I have had to bow to the inevitable and it’s upset me very much.’ It is hard work, skilled work, giving Notes to performers in plays and operas. But we may wonder whether ...”

“... Rothermere with his devastating good looks is now seen as a kind but colourless figure who was nice to her two O’Neill children but couldn’t cope with her new friends: ‘Esmond was hardly allowed to speak as they roared rude remarks past him,’ an anonymous well-wisher is quoted as saying. Her chief interest apart from her parties and Fleming was her ...”

“... says. ‘Yes,’ Nina dutifully adds. ‘I read that too.’ But the thing is they look like nice people. They’re attractive. They’re modestly dressed. They have kind, intelligent eyes. They don’t look like people whose parenting style would bring their son to ‘hit the couch four times a week’ in the office of Dr ...”

“... who’s been sent to Berlin in 1955 to work on a huge phone-tapping operation. There’s a nice moment when, in the process of losing his virginity, he finds himself on the brink of premature ejaculation: ‘He had to avert his eyes, or close them, and think of … of, yes, a circuit diagram, a particularly intricate and lovely one he had committed to ...”

“... is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political ...”

“... is abundant: two journals, essays by Brod and the draft of a collaborative novel to be called Richard and Samuel. Zischler shows that cinema had become, for these two young men at least, an important part of what it meant to experience the wider world. Experiencing the wider world involved the ambiguous pursuit of a young woman they had met on a ...”

“... England’s enduring Catholics would, of course, say that that had always been the case, but if Richard Hooker had lived a hundred years later, not even he would have been able to say with a straight face that membership of the Church of England and of the Commonwealth of England amounted to the same thing. In the next revolution, of 1688-89, attempts at ...”

“... Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.’ The London that Muriel Spark describes in The Girls of Slender Means – ‘buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bombsites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity’ – was still in existence when the novel was published in 1963 ...”

“... case.’ Except that a horrible basket case is exactly what Royal Mail has become, according to Richard Hooper, whose successive reports on the organisation – the first appeared in 2008 – have given the government its case for selling the company off. The legislation to enable the sale is going through Parliament now. ‘Without serious ...”

“... or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and other novelty acts, billed with ...”