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“... landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person … using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.’ Habakkuk’s first guess is very sharp. Reading Adam Sisman’s steady, carefully fair and ...”

“... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... depths and complexity, regardless of how society tries to control or guide it.’ This would be a nice thing for a 16-year-old to hear from Mum or Dad on the night of his or her coming out. It has a nice accepting sound; it bleats of good intentions. But as a serious statement it’s a joke. If the depths and complexity of ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one ...”

“... the clients – she ‘did’ about fifty, she reckons, over two years – for the most part ‘nice to me’, though often upsettingly ‘heavy with humanity, fragility, distress’. The experience was revelatory, and bought her the time she needed to write her first novel, the notorious Baise-Moi (1993), in which two young women cross France on an ...”

“... important speeches and fight important fights. She found that role exhausting as well as exciting. David Owen contends and Williams concedes that she let her new party down and damaged her own career by not fighting Warrington – which Roy Jenkins narrowly lost and Williams could certainly have won – in a by-election in spring 1981, when the SDP was riding ...”

“... On the one hand: well, Semiotext(e) in the 1980s, ooh la la. Chris calls Guattari ‘Félix’; David Byrne is doing the music at Joseph Kosuth’s 50th birthday party, which gets written up the next day in the New York Post. ‘You think we’re decadent sophisticates,’ they write to Dick at one point, faux indignant, going on to explain that they’re ...”

“... into the nether regions is frequently heroic and, in achieving it, he is ennobled but emasculated. David Goodis is the laureate of this mood. William Kennedy, a more recent mythologist of hobo as artist, has seen his novel Ironweed make it all the way to the screen, where Jack Nicholson was obliged to continue his career-long impersonation of the damaged but ...”

“... colours and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerable as petals. ‘I told you it was nice,’ Sylvie said. Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. But of course we do not suppose – whatever the ...”

“... might just get a belly-laugh or two at the Apollo. On Charles himself, there is a handful of quite nice ideas: having him always speak in the third person, arranging for a part of his chin to be swapped by plastic surgery with a part of Anne’s nose (Philip’s advice here: ‘By all means rub your new chin but don’t pick it’), making him slavishly follow ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... poet is another way of saying the book is incomplete. Finally, his argument that we must all be nice to one another, and tolerant, and not resort to ‘rhetoric’, is Jack Hornerish and a good death-recipe for the future discussion of English poetry. Of the books by individual poets, James Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number is a maddening expenditure of ...”

“... sea, one looks back to Beaverbrook with nostalgia for a better class of monster – a pretty nice monster much of the time and at any rate an interesting one. Significantly, the chaste (but not dull) Rupert Murdoch prints semi-dirt and pursues a certain political line because in large social groups the breasts of Samantha Fox and the opinions of Margaret ...”