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“... 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 ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... shyly-stated remarks hung together, but the overall effect was unmistakable. She was being very nice. If Alice will just pass that sick-bag of hers, we can decode these shyly-stated remarks more accurately. Max Hastings has or had a secretary who thinks that Garland’s cartoons are in tune with her preferred party: that is, they are expiring from ...”