“... who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Nice-guyship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavouring to stab; and of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it ...”

“... of Hertford, c.1784, a plain, stuccoed, three-storey affair, nine bays wide. Remodelled for Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection), natural son of the 4th Marquess, 1872-73, probably by Thomas B. Ambler and again in 1906-7 by Fryers and Penman for K.M. Clark. What remains on the site is a 1920s red brick servants’ wing and to the W, the former ...”

“... be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one of the story’s many ...”

“... reminders of the sins for which he was never punished. Nguyen’s anti-communist theorist Richard Hedd (his name isn’t the subtlest of Nguyen’s jokes) has a new book, The Evil Empire’s Oriental Origins. The narrator reads from the last page: ‘History has shown that sometimes the brutish win. The Soviets are attempting to demonstrate that ...”

“... Richard Florida​ has been having second thoughts. In 2002 he argued in The Rise of the Creative Class that the future of advanced economies lay not in manufacturing but in high-skilled areas of the service sector: engineering, design, fashion, media, finance, medicine and law. The industrial revolution had largely originated in cities, but in the 20th century, industry started to move away from them ...”

“... uniform. ‘The Mojaheddin picked this up after his helicopter crashed,’ the American said. ‘Nice-looking kid. Why do they send these boys to Afghanistan to die? Didn’t they learn anything from Vietnam?’ The Russians did not, of course, and their blundering campaign in Afghanistan in the spring of 1980 demonstrated that the Red Army, far from being ...”

“... between academia and the intelligence agencies are multiplying. Cognitive linguists have had a nice sideline in commercial consultancy for some time, but IARPA is booming under the Obama administration and offers some interesting and lucrative opportunities. At the April briefing, the Metaphor Program’s director, Heather McCallum-Bayliss, explained how ...”

“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... the manuscript was finished). And it includes a handful of brilliantly told anecdotes, with some nice bon mots. The Master of Trinity’s reported joke about a future Regius Professor of Greek, for example, predictably appealed to Raven, who picked it out as the best in the book: ‘Such time as Mr Jebb can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes ...”

“... slowly, a mother’s too quickly. A card from Knopf, ‘the usual about receiving the ms’, was nice, but rejections from the ‘disdainful New Yorker’ came in twos. Plath wrote letters in an era when paper and ink still made things happen. You might send a telegram or pick up the phone for the birth of a grandchild, but you used letters to give news of a ...”

“... for the family members he left behind: principally for his mother, about whom he had few nice things to say, and his impressionable, mentally unstable younger brother, Richard, about whom Parker has turned up new material – much of which also makes one think badly of Isherwood. With his family disowned, he formed ...”

“... carry around. Like Akihito and Michiko, Naruhito and Masako give the impression of being terribly nice people, desperately – almost neurotically – concerned that you’re not having a sufficiently good time. They are awkward and distant, not from a sense of entitlement and superiority, but out of an anxious humility.Anxiety was the defining emotion in ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... hat and small round glasses, like James Joyce’, could be picked out of a crowd. The author has a nice ear for the tones and riffs of American speech, a sharp loving eye for tacky motels, country barbecue joints and New York subways, and a contagious fascination with the high-stake gambles of politics. Anonymous can come up with a word like ‘scorps’ for ...”