“... have been more widely covered by other musicians, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix, from Olivia Newton-John to the Waterboys, than those of any other writer. His influence on the history of rock ‘n’ roll is ...”

“... the lively responsiveness of her letters. ‘If she’s really dying, send her my love,’ Olivia Manning said when Stevie Smith was taken to hospital. The poet is reported to have enjoyed this. She had entertained the idea of suicide as an honourable way out since she was nine; she once tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists at Newnes and ...”

“... rupturing of packages inside body-packers’ bellies, the doddering acid casualties, the death of Olivia Channon: these are all tragic. No one can deny that drugs are dangerous. Their pleasures and occasional revelations are bought at a price. Sometimes you pay on the spot: the terrors of a bad trip; unpleasant side-effects, often from adulterants; the jags ...”

“... they did not question the institution itself. In her view, three writers only – Amber Reeves, Olivia Shakespear and Elizabeth von Arnim – did that. I can’t quite share her enthusiasm for Reeves and Shakespear, but I think she is absolutely right to describe von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife (1914) as the ‘most remarkable’ of the Edwardian ...”

“... eyes. The most devastating portrait of Rudy in oily disarray was a New York Magazine profile by Olivia Nuzzi, on his return from Ukraine.She described an early afternoon car ride with him to the restaurant at the Mark, a five-star Upper East Side hotel. Sitting in the back seat with her, his fly unzipped, saliva dripping down his chin, he sang her an aria ...”

“... fully explained by clichés about adolescent revolt. The first girl with whom Evelyn fell in love, Olivia Plunket Greene, was a Catholic, and it was a Waugh family theory that it was she who first turned him against his parents – as it was certainly she who first gave Alec the unkind nickname of ‘Baldhead’. The Plunket Greenes had links with a very ...”

“... Sword of Honour, the three wartime volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy all dealt with the war itself, but the neo-Romanticism of the 1950s also created the appetite for richly coloured quasi-history which made T.H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King a bestseller. Like Macaulay, Runciman ...”

“... fellow might never have known a home. We honour such ghosts less now – movie stars, I mean (Olivia de Havilland closed up that room in July) – and that may be for the best. It’s time to be wary of role models: they say more about advertising than they reveal of human nature. But if you want to get a handle on American movies and desirable ...”

“... share his friend Symons’s taste for dancing girls); his first affair in his late twenties, with Olivia Shakespear, brief, Gonne-clouded, but the foundation of a long friendship; his more casual relationships with Florence Farr and Mabel Dickinson, who gave him a terrible scare when she claimed she was pregnant. The marriage to George Hyde-Lees, and the Wild ...”

“... 1934 both relationships were over. In 1936, she fell in with the actress Edna Thomas and her lover Olivia Wyndham, hopping between Midtown galleries, dancing at the Savoy. Soon, she meddled in a lovers’ spat, and that was over too. Peterson seemed to be replacing her in Van Vechten’s affections and Larsen cut them both off. The correspondence simply ...”

“... Much of the music of Twelfth Night emerges from its not quite anagrammatical names (Malvolio, Olivia, Viola; Illyria, Elysium) from which the rude corporeality of the names Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek are pointedly excluded. The fluidity of names anagrammatically reassembled was without doubt a powerful theatrical resource for Shakespeare, and names ...”

“... of his leading ladies, including Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich, as well as Norma Shearer, Olivia de Havilland and others, with no hard feelings on either side except in the case of Dietrich. Maybe he ‘walked between the raindrops’, as a marvelling collaborator once said. But reports are just as consistent about less flattering traits. Though he ...”

“... Mário​ de Andrade said that he wrote the first draft of Macunaíma in six days. It was December 1926 and he was staying at his uncle’s place outside São Paulo, lying in a hammock, smoking cigarettes and listening to the cicadas. The novel tells the story of the Pemon trickster Macunaíma, whom Andrade had read about in Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s five-volume anthropological study, Vom Roraima zum Orinoco, despite his limited German ...”

“... Edward II and his friends and a performance of Twelfth Night at The Globe, except that Viola and Olivia must have worn a few more clothes. Within Edward II itself, Dr Jardine opines, the effect produced by the sight of Gaveston embracing the king, and the boy-actor who played Isabella fawning on ‘her’ husband, would have been much the same. This argument ...”

“... of Balkan images in English literature from Byron through The Prisoner of Zenda, Dracula, Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and beyond. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read and peppered with hilarious or hair-raising quotations from some of Britain’s most admired authors. A literary critic, Goldsworthy very occasionally commits the sort of error she ...”