“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her alone. Take for a final example the renowned physician, collector and charitable benefactor Richard Mead. When Pilkington first approached him for assistance – she was a distant relation of the Irish branch of the Mead family and was going by the name ‘Mrs Meade’ at the time – he humiliated her, deflating her literary aspirations and dispensing ...”

“... girlfriend by prosecuting a murder case in which the accused will hang. In The Story of the Night, Richard Garay has sex with a stranger to the sounds of revving cars from the police station opposite: Garay’s lover explains that the engines are providing power for a torturer’s cattle prods. Not even sex is a purely private transaction in Tóibín’s ...”

“... autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he would ...”

“... mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the names – or rather, the nicknames ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But a thick, hot, sweet callaloo burnin’ you tongue Wid dem chunk o’ dumplin’ goin’ down nice an’ wid coconut wid o’ widdout deaders as de case may be as de taste may be as de pocket may be but sweet an’ hot Collins is not content to stay in an area some might condemn as ‘local colour’. She pushes ‘Callaloo’ towards a consideration of ...”

“... One-Chord Wonders, which worthily organise and educate the chaotic punk threat until it sits up nice and neat as a Cultural Studies textbook. Jon Savage’s monumental tome, 15 years in the writing and in which the author’s parents and grandmother get thanked for ‘living through this with me – twice’, attempts to do all these things at ...”

“... The insights of the first four chapters seem to be that lots of people do things that are not very nice, that it’s all a very difficult problem, and that, on the whole, it’s better to be sensible than silly in thinking about it (it’s more sensible, at least). It won’t spoil the story much if the reader starts at Chapter Six. Yet amid all the pious ...”

“... along with the bouncy gait of a go-getting salesman on a travelator. Lindsay knows how to coin a nice phrase; I particularly enjoyed his characterisation of the cleared Stapleton airfield as ‘a sandy expanse gridded by empty streets – like a beach awaiting a slow-motion tidal wave of plywood’. Nor is he blind to the possible downsides of ...”

“... Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is something of the whiner in his Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, as there is in Rick Blaine’s self-pitying drunk scene in ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... House’s attack dogs and spinmeisters called it ‘garbage’ and ‘sleaze’. Drudge (who has a nice turn of phrase) called it ‘unspin’. Clinton and his aides had been uneasily aware of the dangers posed by Drudge for some time. As the Starr report records, in mid-July 1997 Clinton told Lewinsky that ‘Sludge’ had turned up something on Kathleen ...”