“... from Istanbul: neither takes much interest in the historic vestiges of Smyrna, in the way an Olivia Manning character would have done in this situation, but instead each devotes herself to indulgence and capering around. There are hints at times of a world like that of The sun also rises, when you wake up not surprised to be still half-drunk and spend ...”

“... school – as in Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia or Violette Leduc’s Thérèse and Isabelle – is a sealed, adolescent world, ripe for melodrama. In Mrs S, it is just as you would expect: the grass is green, the skirts are pleated and the choir sing in Latin, ‘mouths synchronised’. On the way to ...”

“... who had defended Dreyfus. Like nearly all the women with whom Yeats was closely associated – Olivia Shakespear, Florence Farr, Iseult Gonne, his wife George – Maud Gonne, almost as a matter of course, went in for occultism. In her letters she talks about politics and occult experiences with no obvious change of register. She and Yeats often left their ...”

“... realised that in a relationship that should have been among three terms – me, meatball, Olivia – a fourth term had intruded, assuming a dominant role: the name of the meatballs. It was the name gorditas pellizcadas con manteca that I was especially savouring and assimilating and possessing.’ For all the pleasures of this story, Under the Jaguar ...”

“... Knox. She could drive her friends to fury with casuistical arguments and ‘being impossible’. Olivia Manning, a gifted writer but one who never felt that justice had been properly done to her own gifts, had a forked tongue where her sometime friend Stevie was concerned. She recognised, I think, the presence of a genius greater than her ...”

“... it is historians who need to work hardest at seeing Cobbett afresh. Literary specialists such as Olivia Smith and Nattrass herself have done sterling work demonstrating the rhetorical art and innovativeness behind his seemingly artless prose, but with some few exceptions – Ian Dyck is one – current historians are not much interested in Cobbett. Mainly ...”

“... as is the perception that certain names in Twelfth Night are related almost anagrammatically: Olivia, Viola, Malvolio (corroborated by Malvolio’s own musing on the cryptic letter he finds). What does Professor Barton think of ‘Caliban: cannibal’? I am not persuaded by her suggestion that ‘il’ in ‘Emilia’ represents ‘ill’, but I can ...”

“... a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural front’) and easily parodied. It was Olivia Manning’s inspiration to call them the Snows of yesteryear, and John Bird and Eleanor Bron sent them up on The Late Show (Johnson sued). These lives are interesting now because they’re history; but I suspect there’s nothing to recover from the ...”

“... friends to be difficult and in London there seems to have been no lack of choice. The sketch of Olivia Manning is one of the best. He presents her irritating, often unpleasant vagaries with something like affection. It is part of King’s technique that when he has something nasty to say he quotes somebody else as saying it: a device that is several years ...”

“... most of these squabbling, down-at-heel literati would be comfortably at home in the pages of Olivia Manning. To the extent that it offers a kind of instant history, Curfew must already be a period piece. The nightly curfew, with its silence broken by the wailing of sirens and the droning of police helicopters, was lifted before the end of the Pinochet ...”

“... Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the responses of the displaced to them. But if the war involved people in visiting ...”

“... from the actual icon. In the 1970s, there was Grease, in which Stockard Channing as Rizzo mocked Olivia Newton-John’s good-girl Sandy, donning a blonde wig and squealing about holding fast to her virginity while name-checking Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Skip ahead to the 1990s when we – that gay ‘we’ – pored over film history for evidence that ...”

“... busy passing as straight, in his films he played characters who tried to mislead. In The Heiress, Olivia de Havilland’s character is so gauche that he’s forced into being both heterosexual and predatory; in this instance the unconvincing quality of the pitch is the point. There’s a scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) where over the phone the ...”

“... the wealthy Sybil Cutting for cover, into perilous social proximity to Harry, whose own wife, Olivia Cutting, sister-in-law to Sybil, turned out to be ‘a fully-fledged lesbian’.) Edel’s campaign to persuade those in power to recognise his singular authority constituted its own kind of farce: a toxic combination of pettiness and dilatoriness that ...”

“... all they see in the blots are butterflies, certainly not piles of female corpses. In the great Olivia de Havilland movie Dark Mirror – she plays good and evil twins – the test is all about Jungian archetypes. But for the actual test – this is the sentence that Rorschachians always repeat – ‘what matters isn’t what you see, but how you see.’ A ...”