“... to be convinced that he had sexual intercourse with his male friends (with, for instance, Oliver Messel, of whom she said, in feigned anger, ‘I hope he sucks you dry’), and partly by her own brazen infidelities, which led to her having almost as many abortions as periods. She was good-looking. The divorce and its aftermath came on the last of the ...”

“... they also portray the animals in their natural habitat – the grouse shelters in his covert, the green woodpecker perches on a gnarled branch, waders strut by streams, while the marine birds are framed by craggy rocks and pebble beaches. Most of the best engravings include a figure, incident or building which draws the viewer’s eye beyond and behind the ...”

“... young Englishman’ flops into the dining-car seat opposite the author and reveals himself as Oliver Myers, an Egyptologist with a genuine belief in the ghouls and djinns of the Arabian desert. Next we encounter, in the most casual manner, the author’s wife Ernestina, who comes from an extended Latin family somewhere in the neighbourhood of the British ...”

“... next to trousers and a towel in the same colour; a bedspread with red and yellow hearts on it; a green plastic bottle; a grey girls’ top; a black T-shirt with a white Eiffel Tower motif; a child’s thermal vest. The Mexican authorities said all the survivors were adults. The next day a third body, belonging to another male, was discovered by fishermen on ...”

“... contemptuous of once trusted friends and colleagues. Other great egos of our time – Philip Green and Conrad Black, for example – have had the same problem. Maxwell’s grandiosity reached such a pitch that he told the Mirror’s editor Roy Greenslade that a headline about Russian troops invading Lithuania must be wrong because ‘Gorbachev wouldn’t ...”

“... In January, I sat in the military airport in Kuwait staring at razor wire, tents, humvees and a green plastic portaloo and wondered what it would feel like to land back in Baghdad. I boarded a noisy military transport plane and flew to a gravel wasteland surrounded by razor wire, humvees and brown portaloos. Only the sand in the wind indicated I was in ...”

“... Wendy Mulford, John James, with decent selections of Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver. And glimpses of many others, the reforgotten: John Temple, Anna Mendelssohn. It is a truth, unilaterally acknowledged (Cambridge and environs), that Raworth is the man, the only English poet the Americans read. They like, or liked in the days when lines ...”

“... such courts in other states. That is a major omission. The ‘life of law has not been logic’, Oliver Wendell Holmes said. ‘It has been experience.’ As a member of Bush’s administration, Goldsmith would have seen first-hand how it took decisions on the US’s international obligations. Unfortunately he does not draw directly on those experiences. It ...”

“... in 1936 and in May 1937 moved to London, where he was commissioned to write an autobiography, The Green Fool. The book was well received, though a disparaging remark in it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife – or his mistress. I ...”

“... of the Minor Club come a couple of swells. ‘Why,’ says Caroline, loud enough to be heard in Green Park, ‘if it ain’t Captain Flashie, VD – I mean VC.’ The swell, a military man with magnificent moustaches, turns to his pal and says, just as loudly: ‘Hoist that dollymop’s sail, Speedicut, and you’ll be pissing fish-hooks for three ...”

“... noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort familiar to Mr Jingle and Oliver Twist are being enacted. The print implies that cultural institutions, especially the new National Gallery, are detached from the sordid realities of urban life. The Royal Academy moved into the east wing of Wilkins’s building in 1837 while the National ...”

“... letter. Cash failed to get permission to quote from Catherine’s letters, partly because her son, Oliver Walston, was at the same time making a documentary about her relationship with Greene, broadcast a month before The Third Woman was published. To make up for that shortcoming, we have plenty of Greene’s leaden poetry: In a plane your hair was blown And ...”

“... is a Byronic Luddite, with a sneaking sympathy for Arthur Scargill’s pugnacity; now he is a ‘Green’, a true conservative determined to conserve the land of Britain against the assaults of oil magnates and Mr Buchanan-Smith, the Minister for Energy. (This January he has also twice denounced Macmillan for being soft on Russia: the only politician he has ...”

“... media. At this period, one of the 17th century’s better cookery books – apparently the work of Oliver Cromwell’s widow – was published only to be lampooned, and another Civil War widow, Lucy Hutchinson, was constrained to complain of the ‘court caterpillars’ who could present her husband as a life-denier in spite of his affection for music and ...”

“... One especially hot, slow afternoon in September a young man with a brisk manner, piercing blue-green eyes and a heavy accent came in, asked for tickets, showed me his identity card quickly (I had no chance to see his name, only to register that he was a graduate student), and then, as he was leaving, turned and asked me what I had said my name was. When I ...”