“... as if in that moment – but only in that moment – it could neutralise their sting. It’s nice to think of your father hiding himself away because he was playing with toys, and not because he was a manic depressive, as Arthur proved to be. Nicer to be invited to join a conspiracy than to discover only after his death that your father had treasured ...”

“... a dose. Other houses are clean and tidy, like the one belonging to a 27-year-old whom we’ll call David: children’s clothes hang in a courtyard, there is expensive furniture, a big flat-screen TV. A six-year-old girl, vivacious in her pretty mauve dress, welcomes visitors with a radiant smile. David is a ...”

“... Club (‘For Freedom in Everyday Life’): ‘We organise picnics in public places,’ the very nice girl told me, ‘and we smoke and drink at them.’ There was WorldWrite (‘Ferraris for All’): ‘We’re against the notion of pity,’ a boy explained, while trying to flog me a DVD called Flush It!, about how the West foists poor-quality toilets on ...”

“... things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it? I don’t think I can be the only ...”

“... within that world, and spoke out about them. Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet ...”

“... on its own terms triumphantly successful. Lord Liverpool was returned for the third time, with a nice majority. The cause of moderate reform was besmirched by the stain of terrorism and, despite huge popular support, effectively remained outlawed throughout the four decades of uninterrupted Tory rule from 1784 to 1830. The comfortable classes had taken ...”

“... ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so anyone ...”

“... significant onomatopoeias. Posh collectors’ editions of Rabelais often have illustrations. Nice as they are, they get in the way. The only work of Rabelais to be ‘illustrated’ from the outset is the so-called ‘partial’ Quart Livre (1548), which he did not see through the press and whose job-lot of woodcuts was lifted from another book. A ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... of the Novel and which touched painfully on Watt’s wartime experience. Among his objections to David Lean’s blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai were its ignorant unrealism about the possibility of escape from the Thai railway camps and its concentration on the improbable exploits of its American hero, Shears (played by the hunky William Holden). In ...”

“... wholly poetic or rhetorical – that is to say, linguistic; they owe nothing to the painter’s nice distinctions between the pigments on his palette, nor to a naturalist’s knowledge of just how a swift differs from a swallow. Grigson’s views on the proper language for poetry would, on the other hand, make the poet subservient to both the painter and ...”

“... the use of biography, its actual ability to throw light (rather than just to be entertaining and nice to have around), seems to be a fantasy. More particularly, the failure of connection I have mentioned appears to bring in its train a literary fact about Amis himself. Cited by Kenner as one of the philistines, and as liable to give his readers the pleasure ...”

“... longueurs. His detective is a marginal presence, cohabiting in Pooterish domesticity with a nice young man. Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”