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“... One can find,’ wrote Stanley Spencer, ‘interesting and very nice things in dustbins and incinerators.’ Ferreting about among rubbish heaps struck him as ‘a distinctly entertaining and elevating pastime’ and the beads, scraps of china and old books he disinterred ‘really satisfied my highest thoughts ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their unspoken ...”

“... one, shaking us out of our need for better radios.She called one day to ask me to stop sending nice pictures of my holidays to her friend Mary who lived up the road.‘Eh? But I didn’t.’‘Yes, you did. Mary knows all about your time in Mexico –’‘New Mexico.’‘Wherever. She has photos of you all in a hotel. Or in a pool. How do you think that ...”

“... When I watched him paying tribute to Billy Wright on an ITV programme, evoking (as, according to Richard Holt and Alan Tomlinson in their essay, he often does) the lost world of a handful of heroes – Wright himself, Nat Lofthouse, Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews – it was impossible, even allowing for a certain artifice on Mr Major’s part, not to reflect ...”

“... there is "niceness” as a standard of judgment – God, how I hate that word, too! – "a nice girl", "a nice road". Nice = colourless, efficient, with nose glued to the middle path, with middle interests, dizzy with ordinariness. Ugh!’ ‘Going through a long period of ...”

“... we are now to understand, gave the UK a mechanism for opting out of the marriage. There was a nice exchange between the justices when Mr Eadie attempted to elucidate the point. ‘It is a bit difficult,’ Baron Mance of Frognal said, ‘to say withdrawal was in [their] minds … I would have thought it was the last thing that was in your mind when you ...”

“... between 2012 and 2014. The main character, however, is a retired classics professor called Richard, a widower from the former East Berlin whose wife drank herself to death for reasons he doesn’t like to think about. Among other things, Richard is a lightning conductor for the worries a white European novelist might ...”

“... to the joy of seeing the teacher in the grocery store, with no more authority than anyone else. Richard Price wrote the scene for his novel Clockers, and reused it in an episode of the television show The Wire. It’s fine as written, but better on TV, with everything expressed by the quiet way one of the dealers asks, ‘Y’all go to the movies?’ and ...”

“... have been an American officer? I can’t remember. When I remarked that it was lucky to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we go where it suits, and don’t bother about the people.’ Possibly because the staff was prepossessing, but also because the place was ...”

“... of Shrewsbury should have given such sound pastoral advice to the founders of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams and his gang of merry chums: these old boys have shamed their old school, making it a byword. Shrewsbury, as Simon Raven notes, is now notorious for shrewishness. Grand old school-stories have furnished Raven with many quotes and ...”

“... discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art. Yet, as we might expect of this ‘father of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as a secondary text. You’ve become the original.TP: That’s very intriguing. It would be really nice if someone said ‘I just read A Human Document and it’s the most brilliant novel ever, and it’s absolutely disgraceful that you’ve mucked around with it.’ The copy of A Human Document that Oscar Wilde had in his room also has an interference in ...”

“... 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 ...”