“... is about Iosif, i.e. Josef Brodsky. ‘An Encounter in the Bronx’ features Oliver Sacks. ‘FK’ tells of a girl who sounds like Frédérique, but older; ‘Cat’ – ‘the butterfly dances its agony’ – is about the author’s cat. Two pieces feature Bachmann. ‘The Aseptic Room’ visits her in hospital in 1973, where she is ...”

“... not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the pressure of social detail. It is to enter a ...”

“... taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management of space. The estate agent ...”

“... Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and wa-wa sounds by humming and/or gargling gutturally in their throats while blowing legitimate musical notes on brass instruments that were distorted by various metal mutes and/or the manual ...”

“... Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly ...”

“... astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in ...”

“... some other.’ This will seem a mild complaint to Richard Baxter after his fierce clashes with Oliver Cromwell, and his denunciation by Judge Jeffreys: Oy! Oy! What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain that he could not conform? Richard, Richard, dost thou think we’ll hear thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an old ...”

“... Oblivon with which she did it; the way she looked lying dead on Candia’s bed in her knitted green dress; her father saying, ‘Candia, you will never see your mother again’; going to the funeral in her school uniform. Nine-year-old Candia spent the ‘furious winter’ that followed drawing sunsets with the 50-odd lipsticks her mother had left ...”

“... and most reviewers agreed with them. She always had a small circle of devotees – the producer Oliver Smith commissioned her to write a play that year, and kept giving her money over the decade it took her to finish it. But the general incomprehension and dismissal discouraged her, and when asked for a new story for an anthology she claimed she had nothing ...”

“... 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding the Synthetic Society, which, in an age of waning faith, set out to contribute towards a working philosophy of religious belief. A decade earlier, several of the same cast had joined Balfour in founding the Society for Psychical ...”

“... crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous ...”

“... homes, and she disappeared for a while behind their closed ranks.As usual, she went first to Ethel Oliver. The Professor had retired from his curatorship at Kew, and the family were now at 2 The Grove, Isleworth. Here Charlotte’s desire was not to be any kind of a celebrity. But the quiet suburb was not altogether safe. Lady Ottoline Morrell called, with the ...”

“... stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove gives ...”

“... in Johannesburg. He sat in front of us, flanked by Walter Sisulu, his political godfather, and Oliver Tambo, who had been his partner in the law firm they set up in the 1950s and was the ANC’s longstanding president in exile. His delivery, always monotone, was flatter than usual as he read a short statement announcing his separation from Comrade Nomzamo ...”

“... no botanist, no philosopher of wild places. He’s away before the dog accompanists are let into a green oasis that operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay the night. Low-level flats, from an era of less boastful regeneration, are set back from the road behind cushions of coarse grass, teardrop flower-beds planted ...”