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“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... his celebrants were some of America’s most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even ...”

“... has doped out the long-odds favourite of Chico’s library, and in the meantime Chico has turned a nice profit betting on the horse Groucho wanted to bet on until he heard the fatal cry of ‘Get your tootsie-fruitsie ice cream.’ After A Day at the Races in 1937, the Marx Brothers movies came at long intervals, and most of the juice was gone. Yet Groucho’s ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... there’s a good deal of hat-doffing before we process along to the west door of the chapel – a nice sight, I imagine, if one is lucky enough not to have a part to play. Various tourists take pictures.There’s not a soul in the ante-chapel as Richard LM had warned would be the case, though the chapel itself is full. Rupert is in the next stall and Rowan ...”

“... be the shock troops of his army. It was clear then, and later, that many were neither particularly nice nor particularly democratic. Benn is aware of this. He writes of the Militants in his own constituency: ‘They moved endless resolutions. Their arguments are sensible and they make perfectly good radical points but they go on interminably in their ...”

“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... he’d had Nicholas Spice in mind when he invented Nicholas Spare, an odious music critic whom the nice characters in An Equal Music loathe. I decided to avoid the subject of Nicholas Spare. Instead we talked about poetry, and then about Vikram Seth and then about Haydn. How remarkable that Haydn had been a choirboy at the funeral of Vivaldi and yet had ...”

“... in flouting convention, which was anyway in the process of change: but she was fundamentally a nice girl, respectful of her parents’ wishes, repelled by promiscuity, and chaste almost to the point of frigidity. Perpetually falling ‘in and out of love’, which did not require physical requital in her case, she later insisted to Arthur Balfour that ‘I ...”

“... of In Place of Fear. The story accords all too well with the widespread impression of Kinnock as a nice lightweight ill-equipped for the job into which his engaging personality and a large slice of luck have suddenly precipitated him. Experience alone can dispel that impression. In the meantime his eagerness to claim the Bevanite succession raises interesting ...”

“... him more rather than less suitable for public display. For Lord Redcliffe-Maud is, indubitably, a nice man, he would not hurt a fly or, if he did, it would be clear to everybody that it was for the best of motives. Lest I should be thought to be claiming to draw a portrait from the live model, instead of merely giving an informed opinion, such as Lord ...”

“... He is right about that. They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and ...”

“... the bombed areas as quickly as possible. Perpetuation of the genes does not require children to be nice to their parents, but it is saddening to learn that the tendency was to abandon them and for husbands to leave their wives – although not for mothers to abandon their children. The report on Hiroshima and Nagasaki states that the seriousness of atomic ...”

“... for thirty pages reluctant to let his book go, even to hand it over to his fictional alter ego, David Kobra. He has a sub-Kunderesque divagation on his ‘philosophy of ecstasy’ before going on to the ownership of property – descriptions of remote and magnificent real estate are my hot tip for fiction-writers in this last decade of the ...”