“... one’s own childhood had been just like that. One might also, more shamefully, think it quite nice to be that kind of mother. A school was not in fact found, though from time to time there were tutors; and most of Billi’s adolescence was spent – or that’s how it seems – thinking about the lives of the grown-ups around her. About her mother’s ...”

“... who write poetry of home are often aware of its dangers though they may not always avoid them. David Dabydeen’s ‘Coolie Odyssey’, dedicated ‘for Ma’, and included in Section One of the four-part ‘alternative’ anthology, The New British Poetry, opens: Now that peasantry is in vogue, Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... T.E. Lawrence); and nicely cheeky (of Churchill, ‘The old humbug can write’; Baden Powell, ‘nice old gentleman as he must be, is a ... Happiness-addict’). Within a short time he’d mastered all the tricks of the reviewer’s trade. He damns with faint praise (of Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins he withers, ‘Miss Phare ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker seems to have none. No more does she ...”

“... US imperialism: now, in France, an ‘Americanised intelligentsia’, all ‘smiles, good teeth, nice hair’, is ‘the class that is most dangerous to the people’. Not that one must ask the people for their opinion of this, of course, for they will simply repeat what the intelligentsia, through the mass media, have told them. ‘In politics, spontaneous ...”

“... on doing so. These fictions have the elliptical urgency of notes to an intimate; they can also, as David Garnett complained in a letter quoted by Barbera and McBrien, become ‘an impenetrable dossier of private day-dreams’. Some of the incidents and arguments of her novels are treated more cogently in poems. Some of them might have been better not treated ...”

“... bird.’ Hardy, a little earlier, had offered less of a challenge to his own conventionality: ‘Nice, dried up, alert old fellow; liked him.’ Having read Sons and Lovers, he observed severely – and a trifle oddly for one who had devoted ten years to adultery – that ‘the body’s never worth while, and the sooner Lawrence recognises that the ...”

“... presented at the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in April 1995. I’m sure everybody had a nice day out, but why must the speeches then be collected in this way? No good comes of it. Colin MacCabe tells us in his Preface that ‘it is not clear that Warhol’s prodigious output has ever been satisfactorily described, still less understood’ – which ...”

“... her off. She is said to have lived out the rest of her days as a comfortable Roman matron, on a nice estate near Tivoli. No asp for ...”

“... Jamie (two), Gordon, Nigella, the clownish American TV chef Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Irma Rombauer (compiler of the American suburban kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking), and even Delia. In the US, the cable TV Food Network reaches 85 million households, guaranteeing financial success for its stars’ books, videos and restaurants and ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... the Federal Republic (East Germany gets its place, but only a very small one; it would have been nice to see a Trabant opposite the Beetle). Clearly an exhibition illustrating the high standards of German workmanship and its contribution to European culture through the ages is going to concentrate on objects produced for the rich and powerful. But this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”