“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... it was about people like me. The night it was on TV, I swept the carpet, prepared snacks – some Nice biscuits and a mug of hot milk each – and sat my parents down. On the walls of the sitting room was the obligatory picture of the Sikh holy shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar; the photo’s bright colours were fading, its silver-plated frame was ...”

“... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...”

“... the Pinochet coup. Was there any contact between the Thatcher entourage and such groups as Colonel David Stirling’s GB 75? Did Mrs Thatcher know that Airey Neave had been involved in discussions about raising a ‘resistance army’ if Labour were returned in 1979? 3. Airey Neave was later killed by a car bomb outside the House of Commons. It has always been ...”

“... only four o’clock it’s already closing, with boards being put up against the windows and the nice young counter assistant, the daughter of the pharmacist who did Talking Heads for her O levels, hopes that I will be going straight home. For my part I’ve been looking round the shop to see what would come to hand should rioters burst in from the (utterly ...”

“... acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems to have made quite an impact given the surge in Doreens between the wars. Perhaps as a reaction to this spectacular outbreak of fashion in naming, lumbering several generations with names that quickly came to sound modish, old-fashioned or just ...”

“... the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In the spring of 1937 Charles and Lois took a day out with Eileen in the country (‘so mountainous and ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... and she went in search of him. At a pub near Avondale Square she met a friend of Ronnie’s called David. He said he’d been with Ronnie the day before and that Ronnie was in bed the last time he saw him. (The coroner would later describe this man as an ‘unsavoury witness’ without detailing why.) Mrs Pinn, in company with another boy from the bar, went to ...”

“... is right to be aggrieved at Nato expansion. Talking points from Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, David Harvey, Bernie Sanders, Jack F. Matlock Jr et al are cited everywhere, along with Russian disinformation (the Russian TV station RT has a huge following on Weibo). Ukraine is often described as a failed state, its only hope of survival to accept its role as ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... committed to (that’s to say, the signatories of the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 agreed it would be nice), is that the average global temperature will rise no more than 2ºC by the end of the century. Sea level has risen 6 cm since 1990. The IPCC’s fourth assessment report (2007) projected that it would rise between 18 and 59 cm by 2100. According to a more ...”

“... a climax in any conversation, and there were many, about mixed marriages. ‘You may find a nice shiksa and fall in love with her. Not all goyim are coarse. Many of them are truly refined, and you may marry one and live happily together for years. But someday, when you least expect it, the two of you will be having an argument, and the argument will get ...”

“... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...”

“... been a sunny day, but for all that, my hands are covered in short white gloves. Very smart, very nice, my mother would have thought. She is in a floral frock, belted at the waist and falling almost to her ankles, as all her dresses did to hide the scar on one of her legs which was left after a road accident that happened before I was born. Her hair is dark ...”