“... Cruickshank’s ‘vividly terrible’ illustrations of Oliver Twist, whose pictures of the ‘nice’ people and scenes seemed to him almost more frightening than the sinister ones. Sent to bed while one of his older cousins read aloud from the first instalment of David Copperfield, he managed to hide himself and listen ...”

“... the longer term it would be necessary to enable him to enter a scientific path,’ a nice way of saying he should be shunted into academia, where he was already studying part-time. The problem was evidently that he was a Jew, and specifically that his father – always a man of Zionist sympathies, with a daughter in Israel – had visited the ...”

“... ceiling and statuary in the alcoves. John, Momma and Grandma stayed on the 18th floor. ‘Very nice,’ he recorded in his diary. He returned a celebrity, but, more than a year after his brother’s death, he found himself still grieving. Roffman quotes a poem, ‘The History of My Life’, that Ashbery wrote sixty years later: Once upon a time there were ...”

“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... must minister to the rich.’   ‘Of course,’ said Ianthe. ‘And you have some very nice people in your congregation,’ she added consolingly.   ‘Yes, both my church wardens are titled men,’ said Randolph simply. He stood with the carving implements poised over the ruined saddle. ‘Let me give you some more mutton, my ...”

“... elderly, garrulous addicts to court fashion, this guide to their mannered pronunciation seems a nice characterising touch. We might be irritated with Muir for removing it; Wells’s principles for modernisation require that the word remain if it has a characterising function, but the good principle has arguably failed in practice. In the Greek council scene ...”

“... met with setbacks – the Sardinian police, taking him for a revolutionary, re-routed him via Nice. Momentum was lost, consolation discovered in writing the Roi Lear Overture and making love ‘to a girl on the shore’. In 1831 Harriet had returned to demeaning provincial engagements (Norwich, Bristol, Lincoln, Liverpool); then back to the Royal Coburg ...”

“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... to St Petersburg; 131 shot or bombed in the Paris attacks of 2015; 86 run down by a truck in Nice the following year; 593 killed in an operation in the Philippines the year after that; 311 killed when attackers opened fire during Friday prayers at a mosque in Sinai; 149 killed by a suicide bomber at an election rally in Pakistan – not to mention the ...”

“... memoirs written late in life. When we first meet him he’s in his mid-thirties, lives in a nice house in Chancery Lane, has a horse called Chancery, works in the Court of Chancery – you get the idea. Sansom has given his hero his own passion for the law, its stately, logical protocols, its civility and rationalism. Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a ...”

“... income. Responding to the increasingly prevalent view that Britain had a serious mobility problem, David Cameron’s coalition government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... of the 21st Lancers enjoyed himself thoroughly. ‘I am ready for another man-killing job. It is nice to put a sword or a lance through a man; they are just like old hens, they just say “Quar!”’ The savagery of these battles was unavoidable given the close nature of the conflict and the relentlessness of the enemy attacks. The defeat of the Egyptian ...”