“... 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 ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a substantial private library – such ...”

“... at this collection, this fat blue chunk of his life, Penman missed. The tarted-up paperback is nice to have around but the words are in pages, not columns. They don’t play off smudged photographs and corner of the eye glimpses of other reports over which he had no control. Penman liked the William Burroughs moment, reading the tabloid spread as a single ...”

“... early television career in the 1960s had its frothy side. He helped create a variety show, Nice Time, co-hosted by Kenny Everett. He worked on programmes involving cartoons and, more famously, Mick Jagger. He spent his salary on clothes from Granny Takes a Trip, the prosperous London hippie’s retailer of choice on the King’s Road. ‘I wanted to ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...”

“... and this must be what I yearn for.’ ‘I think that what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with.’ Plus, despite his failure to reproduce with Jenn, ‘I have always wanted daughters.’ Nevertheless he disqualifies himself from future relationships (‘never again me-woman’). He has a strategy of ‘jerking off at least ...”

“... the Daily Mail. In his memoir Cold Cream, Mount says drily that great editors are rarely nice men, ‘and David English was a great editor.’ Harry Evans defies that rule. And now that the 20th century has turned into the 21st, the English press is diverse but not financially vigorous; compared with the 1890s or ...”

“... of the exquisite divinatory intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Disneyland too has a monorail, and though on my first visit to the Getty I thought of it as a nice tribute to its sister amusement park, we perplexed everyone around us by walking up the unfrequented road the quarter mile or so to the museum. Altitude correlates neatly with economic clout in urban and suburban California, so although the presumed point of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”