“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... to reply cheerfully to any ugly name you might call it. Hi, I’m the Nightmare of Consumption. Nice to meet you! The Corrections, as well as being a far better novel than Jameson’s stricture on an ‘exhausted realism’ would suggest it could be, is a central instance of the literary populism that we can now recognise as one of the main trends of the ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... 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 ...”