“... to increase punctiliousness. Don’t be alarmed, there are a few white folks even up here. Nice disagreeable sort of letter isn’t it? Glad you & dad seem to be enjoying life. I don’t suppose anyone can live in books steadily & not get grouched occasionaly. Have seen & heard nothing out-side this cramped narrow lopsided hole except last ...”

“... than one appelé was told – ‘going to Algeria is no more dangerous than driving from Paris to Nice.’ (At that time about ten thousand people died every year on the autoroute.) War meant the Battle of Verdun, where more than 160,000 Frenchmen died, and Algeria wasn’t Verdun. The right of conscientious objection wasn’t recognised. Even the Communist ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... the 18th century. The Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s did not have to be invented: it’s a nice conclusion to the King’s illness and needed no departure from historical truth. Beginning my career as an historian, I find it harder to take liberties with the truth than someone whose upbringing has been less factually inhibited. I have to be forced into ...”

“... the uniform of the tsarist Ministry of Railways!’ he exclaimed as he ushered me in. ‘What a nice thing to see. But why have you no proper winter coat? We have to find you one.’ We never found the coat: Igor, as I later discovered, was an old socialist who was indifferent to material possessions, a point of contrast between him and Irina. But Igor had ...”

“... tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian bases. Musharraf was initially popular in ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... Eleanor Ward also noticed the change: ‘Suddenly, I discovered that everyone had very good, nice, new teeth.’The work Warhol was doing for shop windows didn’t immediately generate the same kudos. But it would, with very little adaptation. ‘What almost nobody in 1961 would have seen, had they passed the window at Bonwit Teller,’ Arthur Danto ...”

“... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...”

“... journalist; Emil, the worst young lyricist in the world; Solveig, a nurse; Turid, addicted to some nice-sounding drug called Sobril; Iselin, the teen girl Knausgaard should have been writing about the whole time; Vibeke (picture not found); Egil, the writer and documentarian, the near mad, the pillar-sitter. We find them in a seaside town in southern ...”

“... only four o’clock it’s already closing, with boards being put up against the windows and the nice young counter assistant, the daughter of the pharmacist who did Talking Heads for her O levels, hopes that I will be going straight home. For my part I’ve been looking round the shop to see what would come to hand should rioters burst in from the (utterly ...”

“... acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems to have made quite an impact given the surge in Doreens between the wars. Perhaps as a reaction to this spectacular outbreak of fashion in naming, lumbering several generations with names that quickly came to sound modish, old-fashioned or just ...”

“... his family – 15 of them – camped out at the Derridas’ flat outside Paris, before moving to Nice. Derrida, who would return to Algeria only twice, often spoke of his ‘nostalgeria’; he continued to insist that ‘a different type of settlement’ might have led to less suffering. Peeters suggests that Derrida had Algeria in mind when he expressed the ...”

“... there was a lot of rushing about that I certainly couldn’t control and didn’t even desire. A nice boy called Alan Mindel slipped on some polished linoleum as he raced around, hit his chin on the veneer of a rosewood dressing-table, and had to have a couple of stitches put in. My mother reacted with fury and gave me a beating in front of several ...”

“... the anthem of youth and disaffection. Now there was Elvis, Bill Haley and even our own Cliff Richard. Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon’) Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and ...”