“... cellophane the colors shine: popsicle orange and lemon-ice white, cotton-candy pink and mint-jelly green, cherry-soda red and raspberry-jello red. Cellophane crackles in the green-and-red-tinted dark.’ Here, the frankly nauseating means to evoke the object under scrutiny. With the novelist’s own (as it ...”

“... whose execution in 1724 drew a crowd of two hundred thousand people. Nor is there any testament to Oliver Cromwell, whose remains, along with those of two other regicides, were disinterred after the Restoration, and hanged at Tyburn in a posthumous execution. The Tyburn Tree plaque seems even more modest when compared with the elephantine public sculptures ...”

“... officialdom and a description of what seems to be a tank or armoured vehicle – an olive-green van and its four-ways-facing lily strafing the boulevards – suggest that she may be Eastern European, but, as with everything else about Katerina, we cannot be sure. ‘I write poems and make the best of what I have’ is as much as she will tell us. The ...”

“... of drama, music and variety than the staid and news-oriented Home Service. The first guest was Vic Oliver, a popular Austrian musical comedian. Plomley scripted the episode and the transcript survives. Talk was squeezed in round the edges of the records: a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with Plomley, the actor manqué, as the straight ...”

“... in his own time. This particular biography calls for even greater respect because its author, Oliver Mac Donagh, has established himself as the most incisive and (with the late F.S.L. Lyons) the most prolific Irish-born historian of his generation. The compound is preferred over the simple adjective to describe Mac Donagh not because there is any doubt ...”

“... talking to her and her son Edgar. ‘Nelson used to come here often,’ said Edgar, ‘along with Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and M.B. Yengwa. They used to talk for hours and hours. With father and Yengwa being Zulus and the other three all Xhosas, they talked mainly in English. When I see Nelson now on TV I can see that the other ANC leaders look to him as ...”

“... Ray could be a disappointed grown-up version of Submarine’s precocious teenage narrator, Oliver Tate. Both are character studies that remind you how annoying really funny people often are. Both have the same undertow of sexual creepiness, and the same unhealthy fixation with researching medical conditions. ...”

“... miniatures, including examples by leading practitioners such as Nicholas Hilliard (b.1547), Isaac Oliver (b.1565), John Hoskins the Elder (b.1590), Samuel Cooper (b.1609), Richard Cosway (b.1742), John Smart (b.1741) and George Engleheart (b.1750).Miniatures pose many curatorial challenges. These are objects which were designed to be held in the hand and ...”

“... the early days of the Nkrumah presidency as one big revolutionary cocktail party, with people like Oliver Tambo, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King in attendance. Accra quickly became a magnet for liberation movements across the continent, but it also attracted spies, war criminals and corrupt businessmen. Malcolm X remembered sitting in a hotel dining room ...”

“... an internal market into the NHS, following on from the ‘options for radical reform’ set out by Oliver Letwin and John Redwood in 1988. It had three pillars: GP fund-holding (delegating budgets to individual GP practices); the replacement of health authorities by ‘NHS trusts’ (self-governing accounting centres with borrowing powers, and their own ...”

“... CDU-FDP coalition and opened the possibility of a new progressive alliance. The first Red-Green coalition took office in Hesse in 1985. In shabby trainers, Joschka Fischer, once a street-fighter of the hard left, was sworn in as Hesse’s environment minister. By the end of the 1980s, with the pugnacious Oskar Lafontaine, the prime minister of ...”

“... left to themselves, branches would overtop the houses by many metres and form a summer tunnel of green. In other places and at other times the lopped branches would have been a resource. In Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976), Oliver Rackham makes a distinction between wood and timber. Wood, the renewable ...”

“... a flower. ‘About six inches in length,’ he commented, ‘a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.’ ‘Yes,’ I said encouragingly, and what do you think it is, Dr P.?’ ‘Not easy to say.’ He seemed perplexed. ‘It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own ... I think this ...”

“... five weeks later. Over the next nine months they covered plenty of ground, travelling west to Green Bay and south to New Orleans before heading back to New York. Some critics have argued that Tocqueville didn’t really get America – that he failed to notice the early signs of industrialisation in the Midwest, missed the religious revival among the ...”

“... Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands is Volume 100 of the New Naturalist series, started by Collins after the Second World War with the aim of making ecology accessible to the increasing numbers of people who visited the countryside and had a serious curiosity about what it contained. It included such early classics as R ...”