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“... its duty and an LAPD man calls to see if there is a problem. Over chocolate cake and coffee the nice Officer Rodrigues complains of racism in the force, and takes a shine to nice Mrs O’Hallahan. When a particularly nosy neighbour asks too many questions Mrs Stansfield joins Marvin in the garden. It does not simplify ...”

“... I’ve been having these bad dreams about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me ...”

“... a university professor, about to return home. ‘What do you think of Poland?’ she asks. ‘Very nice,’ I reply politely; then, as her face creases with incredulity, I add: ‘Nice people.’ ‘Nice people,’ she agrees wryly. ‘But things are terrible here. We have ...”

“... writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a portrait of amour fou and its aftermath in ...”

“... safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A ...”

“... new educational class which dominates the journals and the universities. Defence policy provides a nice dividing line between those who believe that our survival depends on a new generation of Polaris rockets and those who are slightly embarrassed when asked where they propose to get the money from which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy? It ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... to a version of style that negates itself and calls itself Austerity. (The opening chapter of David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, 1945-51 is called ‘Waiting for Something to Happen’.) It can take a while for a decade to have a style. The 1950s, for example, weren’t really the 1950s until the 1960s so clearly turned out to be the 1960s.* We know ...”

“... The sun shines bright on the homely Victorine film studios in Nice. Meet Pamela is poised to go. Director Ferrand, however, is case-hardened; he knows that, on even such a straightforward programme-filler as this, compromise will be inevitable. Sure enough, the cat is disobedient. Increasingly dependent on the bottle, the actress playing the hero’s mother forgets her lines but stands on her dignity: ‘With Federico it was just – One, two three!’ The lab ruins a crowd scene ...”

“... a highly successful strategy. Before the debate proper began, Palin told Biden that it was nice to meet him and could she call him Joe. Her hometown folksy style (from frequent ‘darn it’s to the occasional ‘it ain’t so’) was supplemented by pointed reminders that Alaska is an energy-producing state. She contrasted ‘East Coast ...”

“... survive an honest admission of not being able to play the game. The consensus was that it would be nice to think she could. But that would mean everyone else agreeing to suspend the rules of the game. Which meant she couldn’t. By the time the story reached Newsnight that evening, Evan Davis was questioning the former chair of the Green Party, Jenny ...”

“... tried it as a pillow. A woman in the toll-booth outside the Dartford Tunnel said: ‘That looks nice.’ A man at a garage thought it was a fossilised meat pie, and an expert in early Christian sculpture at the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland stroked its surface and said, ‘“Yes, yes,” as if it were a ...”

“... by the rise of Nazism: Charlotte and her grandfather, Ludwig Grunwald, were living together in Nice at the time. If they were at Gurs they were released soon afterwards, making their way back to the Côte d’Azur under a cloud. Grunwald was elderly, frail and monstrous; wherever these weeks were spent, outside of ...”

“... a fitting climax to the lyrical expedition across the Pennines from Richmond to Clitheroe. It’s nice to see that the author pulled in quite a lot of ‘countryside of the sort lucky not to have been stripped out and exported to Japan’. How different from his final slog from Birmingham to catch the count at Huntingdon, which evinces the comment that ‘a ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”