“... that we might consider returning them, with their consent, to the countries they came from.’Very nice: ‘with their consent’. And so to Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures recorded by the military historian Nicholas Reynolds may not admit such subtlety. Reynolds is a former curator of the CIA Museum in Washington. Reasonably, the museum is a bit cagey and ...”

“... it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd sourly realistic vignette. The exhibition shows how two different visual cultures produced what lives side by ...”

“... after I got to my Central Park South hotel room, the giant star, Actor C, walked in. He was very nice, wild about the script, talked a lot about the FBI, and began to fill me in about the story. The next day I met Actor A in an empty café. He said if we offered him Donnie, he would accept immediately. I said he was wrong but would be great as Lefty, and ...”

“... it in many fashionable diets – how fibre affects digestion and even what it actually is. It is nice to learn that the Maya and Aztec anticipated modern science by discovering empirically that, before being eaten, maize needs to be processed with an alkaline substance, such as ashes or lime: if consumed untreated, as it was when first introduced to ...”

“... to a dot – two dots – on the map? The poet and academic Robert Crawford has a soft spot for nice spots and he dedicated his 1990 collection, A Scottish Assembly, ‘to Scotland’. Some countries and some cities – like some people – openly insist on being loved, and some of them behave as underdogs, which only ramps up the need. (A dedication ‘to ...”

“... intervention. ‘The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?’ Writing in 1975, David Thomson compared Garbo to Christ – there were times in their lives when all they wanted was to be left alone – before concluding with a reiteration of the same ‘mysterious truth’: ‘She was photographed. She was all in the silver.’ Whether Garbo ...”

“... years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself – a difficult undertaking ...”

“... lapdog – and saw each other every time I came to New York. She had written me a number of very nice letters and given me signed copies of her books. She wanted to warn me off ‘all those magazines full of phonies who are going to try to use you up and kill your talent and make you write bullshit’. I was delighted to be liked by her. She had written some ...”

“... motives. Nona Summers, a society hostess, was that evening minding her own business in her own nice home in the company of Jack Nicholson and three hundred others. She had, understandably, drawn the line at Rupert and Min, who seem to have been upset by this. Rupert’s idea of a Water Board worker was a man with an Irish accent. He tried out his ‘vague ...”

“... of a philosopher who has been driven out of polite society. Oldenburg’s letter of 1655 is a nice example of how uncomfortable respectable people (at least after the publication of Leviathan in 1651) were when dealing with Hobbes, who was assumed to be an atheist. (Malcolm thinks this assumption was false, but Hobbes’s close friend Sorbière seems to ...”

“... represents, he suggests, two species of hypocrisy; but there is also a third kind, found among the nice-minded who want to ease their consciences with rhetorical gestures. Enzensberger is unsparing: ‘Only someone who seriously hopes for the collapse of the global economy, with all the consequences that entails, and who is capable of thinking another option ...”

“... spirit to the bill. For V.H. Galbraith, Richard was a ‘misfit in his own class’ with ‘nice personal habits’, a ‘non-co-operator, who hates rugger and cricket and refuses to shout on the touchline’. (Galbraith revealed something of his own background here: a public school boy, he had shown ‘impetuous courage’ in the First World ...”

“... I didn’t notice any of this while I was there. Perhaps I should have been looking harder.) The nice people at WiML welcomed me in anyway. The atmosphere wasn’t so different from the rest of the conference: practical, serious-minded, problem-oriented. The president of WiML reminded me that her organisation did not exist to provide a haven for women within ...”

“... prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about ...”

“... know what it means: you’ve got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t think it was a frightfully good idea. I was always, as a child, fascinated by things ...”