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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... From the​ 1970s to the 1990s anyone who, like me, was interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework ...”