“... is that nothing is just what an android needs, a mark of real class. Michael Fassbender plays David, the android, with terrific, elegant style, not as if he were Peter O’Toole but as if he liked Peter O’Toole – a fine distinction. His uniform makes him look like a prisoner rather than a servant, and the effect is that of one of the more likeable ...”

“... Nice story’, Freud says when Jung gives him an account of a patient’s pathology. The tone is amused, but a sense of shock lingers, an ironically disguised disapproval of everything the master learns about transgressive behaviour. Jung is shocked too, but also excited. But then the patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, the author of a book about horizontal organising methods used in Argentina, conversed with twenty-somethings freshly radicalised by disappointment in the president they helped to elect. Not long after the police massed at the ...”

“... universities. These men, he alleges, wanted to create a ‘New Jerusalem’, to be nice to the workers and to retain a faded empire. They were both welfarist and imperialist beyond the means of the economy they controlled, which they were incapable of modernising because they were ignorant of science, technology and industry. Barnett notes ...”

“... It’s not possible to argue that the precautionary principle only makes sense when applied to nice environmental issues and not to nasty military ones. But it is possible to argue that it doesn’t make sense in either case. Indeed, this is what its application to the war in Iraq brings out – how can something be called precautionary if it involves a ...”

“... were the twin pleasures of being on the alt-right: fuelling impending conflict and skimming a nice commission off the top.The other boon for this version of neoliberalism is that its alt-right proponents weren’t the only ones raising the stakes. Though Slobodian doesn’t really want to address it, the alt-left was just as willing to take things to the ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... Britten … Mr Pears would say: ‘Well, Mr Britten likes nursery food, you know, ’e likes his nice milk pudding.’ I said, ‘Yes, but he likes it nice, nice creamy milk pudding’ … Mr Britten also liked Spotted Dog [camera briefly rests on dachshund curled up by Miss Hudson’s ...”

“... of My Life as a Man to a young lady under the ping-pong table, yelping ‘good shot’ and ‘nice return’ to allay her parents next door, will be disappointed. The Facts contains not a single lavatorial or sex scene. No family liver is profaned. Roth, being Roth, cannot keep the facts he does tell entirely straight. Framing the (strangely ...”

“... and also a perception of institutionalised social hierarchies as presumptively unjust. In a nice turn of phrase, Hunt speaks of ‘the difficulty of maintaining social distinctions in an impatiently equalising world’. In France and its empire, the logic led to granting full civil rights to religious minorities (first Protestants, then Jews), and ...”

“... understood as an alternative to Hollywood’s increasingly rapid-fire cut-and-paste. It would be nice to think that one of the films Kafka saw on 20 November 1913 was, as Zischler proposes, Léonce Perret’s L’Enfant de Paris (1913), which made intricate use of staging in depth; unfortunately, the evidence he himself has supplied (a poster advertising the ...”

“... supermarket turkeys for the hearts of the Canada geese. Canada geese and frozen turkeys: that is a nice, very clear contrast, and Lipsha understands its meaning perfectly well. But then there are the difficulties, the intricacies, around that nice clear contrast. Baloney sandwiches, and especially soft baloney ...”

“... has established a prima facie case, which should be tested elsewhere. In particular, it would be nice to know more of how a similar difference of farming regions affected the pattern of allegiance in Norfolk during the Civil War. Where this book is particularly open to criticism is on the points Professor Underdown considers too obvious to be in need of ...”

“... a piece by Ross McKibbin praising his and Harold Wilson’s record in government: ‘it is rather nice,’ he wrote, ‘to cease to be a kind of non-person.’ Still, for all the pathos, Callaghan was 68 when he resigned in 1980, the only man to have held all four of the great offices of state, and had been in Parliament since 1945. It wasn’t a bad ...”