“... loved, likewise Trainspotting. Almost anything scatological had great appeal. He also enjoyed the Richard Yates books I shared with him. When I was ill at one point I read through all of Derek Raymond, whom I recommend to anyone with a stubborn bacterial infection. ‘Oh, yes,’ Thom said, ‘he’s wonderful, isn’t he.’ Sometimes we came on an author ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... since these intellectual entrepreneurs were determined to get ahead of the game – was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making. But Slobodian shows that this was just the tip of a Mont Pelerin-sized ...”

“... Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. Dr Ford, appearing in public for the first time, turns out to be the nice next-door neighbour, but one who is also a psychology professor, able to speak of memories registering in the hippocampus. Her high-pitched adolescent voice and habit of flicking back strands of hair is at first disconcerting, but becomes wrenching as she ...”

“... asked the question never expressed better than by Angela Carter in the LRB in 1980: ‘Why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J-P?’At the end of the first year of the Sartre-Beauvoir pact – marked by that first experience of jealousy, which she dispelled by walking up and down the Butte Montmartre ...”

“... outgrew. And mostly a straight men’s club at that, if the patronising reference to ‘that nice faggot John Ashbery’ is any indication.) For such an aspirer at such a time, with the entire world engulfed in war, beautiful miniatures – glass menageries – were out of the question: life was to be absorbed in great gobs and gulps in lusty pursuit of ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it? I don’t think I can be the only ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... sweet souls such as old Mrs Carr who looked like a ‘very benevolent and nervous ghost’, with a nice husband who said: ‘ “We daren’t leave Mrs Carr at home because she is so mischievous – so we have to take her with us.” But he got her in the drawing-room and took her hand gently when no one was looking.’ He had as keen an eye for a ceremony as ...”

“... Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV – which is nice, but it won’t pay the rent, and people who can’t pay their rent in the Eighties are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time. Doc’s always said that when the going gets weird the ...”

“... in a box in 1934; it appeared in English in book form in 1960, thanks to the patient labours of Richard Hamilton, who also constructed a precise copy of the Large Glass, which Duchamp signed, for the Tate. The notes tell us, among other things, that the Bride is a motor, or more precisely the ‘timid potency’ of a motor, and also that she is a ‘tank of ...”

“... had not been a particularly intellectual woman, or, according to some witnesses, a particularly nice one. Whether Lewis mostly worshipped her or mostly suffered her, or both or neither, we don’t really know. He began by needing her and ended by looking after her; perhaps it was not such an unusual relationship. In 1926 Lewis began a friendship that was to ...”

“... In 1981, the last time a Zweig revival was plotted, it failed; this time, with Pushkin Press’s nice paper and pretty formats and with new translations by the excellent Anthea Bell,* it seems to be succeeding – John Fowles (a representatively Anglo-Saxon e and u crossbreed) wrote: ‘Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse ...”