“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his inattention drove her to an embarrassing alcoholic binge. He’s now a mortician, ‘very nice-looking in those black clothes’. Looking at Darcy the undertaker, she thinks: ‘I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.’ Munro’s retrospective technique isn’t without its score-settling. A novel in the form of interlocked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... your life.’Powell began his career as a studio hand on silent films at the Victorine studios in Nice. He was ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, as he put it, to Rex Ingram, a flamboyant Irish director known for making extravagant epics. Ingram’s Mare Nostrum (1926) was ‘a great film to come in on’, Powell wrote, ‘a spectacular film, full of enormous ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was widely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... my arms just reaching her nose and my head resting comfortably on the top of the couch, with a nice view of the set. Perfect. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. I give her a thumbs up. Then she spits green fluid into the half-moon receptacle. Achak doesn’t watch much TV in the refugee camps, but he goes to school, plays with his friends, obsesses ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ideally generates new headlines at least three or four times a day, especially when there is a nice fast-breaking scandal or moral panic to hammer away at. Politicians don’t feel that the press represents anyone apart from itself, and think it is arrogant and unaccountable, and the press feels the same things about the politicians, and both are right. As ...”