“... comes from Iago’s half-jesting comment to Desdemona, after she presses him to think of something nice to say about her: ‘O gentle lady, do not put me to’t,/For I am nothing if not critical.’ For all its forbidding pauselessness on the page, If Not Critical catches something of the movement of a speaking voice and the demands it makes on the ...”

“... 2000, the same year as Mankell’s similarly themed The Return of the Dancing Master, so it’s a nice touch that Hole is briefly taken off the case and sent to fester in Wallander’s territory, a.k.a. ‘some godforsaken place in Sweden’. ‘In the detective story,’ Auden writes in ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, the setting should be the Great Good ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion from ...”

“... For the modern scholar, the consolation is a good score in the latest research assessment, some nice trips at someone else’s expense, and a few reassuring footnotes in the publications of other, reciprocally unconsoled rummagers. This is what’s called disinterested scholarship; but it occasionally breeds internecine quarrels that can seem anything but ...”

“... reality receives the occasional anguished acknowledgment in the letters. ‘You kindly say it is nice to have a 2nd home,’ Fitzgerald wrote to her daughter Maria in 1974. ‘I wonder if you feel you have a 1st one! But we love you very much and that must count for something.’ To Carduff in 1987 she remarked that ‘on the whole I think you should write ...”

“... lot of baloney’ the latterday gossip that Rudy was a homosexual, angrily insisting: ‘He was a nice, normal human being.’ But he confirmed that – except when Rudy was with Natacha Rambova, the woman who became his second wife – Rudy seemed content with a passive stance when it came to actual sex. Not that we should trust Ivano as normalcy’s ...”

“... More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of Garnett’s eyes and set mouth ...”

“... Dickie and Imelda are both aware that life can spring nasty surprises, often hard on the heels of nice ones, and the novel opens at a point when, having long since settled into a comfortable if joyless status quo, they are being reacquainted with this knowledge. The Bee Sting is about people not taking things quite seriously enough, or making decisions for ...”

“... all other participants were female. Andreeva admitted that she had ‘fallen’ for Don (‘such a nice, clean, typically American boy!’) and thought Don might like to write to a Soviet girl of his own age: her (blonde) niece Marina, perhaps, or her (brunette) friend Amelia – ‘he can choose according to his taste.’ Don took up with Marina, his younger ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... started to feel as if I really didn’t know what was going to happen next. Nazi-Soviet pact? Not nice, but perhaps it means we shan’t be having to fight an alliance of three Fascist powers, including Franco’s Spain. Churchill as prime minister? All very well, but some of us remember the Dardanelles – and besides, look at the people around him! To be ...”

“... but I have never seen it properly discussed or described. I don’t know what I am. Am I twice as nice? Am I twice as alive now as I ever was? On the Internet, I look up ‘HeLa’ on Yahoo and find, within minutes, that the woman’s name was Henrietta Lacks. So what is she missing, I wonder, what does Henrietta lack? What does she want now? I type her name ...”

“... an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s L’Or, and a version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all ...”

“... 1%’ signs and shouting at the delegates: ‘Don’t look at me, you might catch poverty.’ David Brooks of the New York Times walked by. He always seemed to be walking by. A man pointed at the ‘Mr 1%’ sign and said: ‘That should be “Mr 0.001%”, thank you.’ They were considering a trip to a strip club to confront delegates about ‘issues ...”