“... directly at me. “Yes,” I answered.’ Jacobson’s journey begins in Kimberley: he goes north through the Transvaal, across Bophuthatswana – which died in a blaze of ignominy last year – up to Botswana and from there into Zimbabwe, with a brief excursion into Zambia. For much of the time, he remains unsettled; engaged, amused, alarmed, seldom at ...”

“... as farce or fiction. What is one to make of an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from ...”

“... voting than social class or level of education, and a much better indicator than living in the North of England. The best indicator of all (according to the British Election Study) was support for the restoration of the death penalty. Similarly, the vast majority of Trump voters were traditional Republicans in traditional Republican areas. In the ...”

“... bus stops, and the shops grow shabbier. Here on the corner of Peckham Road and Southampton Way is Oliver Goldsmith School, which Damilola Taylor attended. Another group of policemen stands outside it. Behind the railings which line one side of the building are laid out the inevitable floral tributes to the boy – a line of cellophane bouquets stretching for ...”

“... of ‘imperial redemption’. The hero of Davis’s account of the first expedition is a Canadian, Oliver Wheeler, who revolutionised survey photography and discovered and mapped the East Rongbuk glacier, the ‘key to the mountain’ that Mallory failed to notice. Wheeler would help to provide the maps that defeated the Japanese invasion of India in the ...”

“... analogies of subject that focus in several instances considerable differences of treatment. Oliver Sacks’s stirring ‘The Leg’, a true story of paralysis which deals in eloquently measured prose with, the author’s loss of the sense of his left leg, and which itself teaches by precise and humane example the ‘conjunction of science and ...”

“... There’s​ a scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of Radium to describe Dunthorne’s acerbic grandmother’s ‘fuzzy’ woollen jumper. Here, though, the blurring effect becomes a metaphor for our misty view of the past, a foreign country where the customs are silence and dissimulation ...”

“... family, in short, rather than a complex or extended one. Like other nationalities in North-West Europe, the English practised ‘neo-local’ residence: on marrying, a young couple would settle in a separate household near their parents. Marriages tended to be consensual rather than enforced by parental fiat, contracted in the ...”

“... of Self’s prose. The plot of Umbrella is a fictional reworking of the events described by Oliver Sacks in Awakenings, when patients who had spent decades in a catatonic state after contracting a virus after the First World War were temporarily woken up by a new drug, L-Dopa. In Self’s version of events, the administrator of the wonder drug is not ...”

“... force for Heaney at that time because of his own recent experience. His most controversial book, North, had appeared the previous summer. Several of its most striking poems grew from a fascination with the Iron Age bodies that had been exhumed from the peat bogs of Northern Europe: the subject became, as he later recollected, ‘a completely instinctive ...”

“... will abandon his job and family to take up arms. The EZLN risks its gravitas when celebrities like Oliver Stone queue up to visit Marcos; humourlessry the Government had Nixon pulled from the cinemas. There’s nothing cornier than the foreigners’ congas in the Oventic Aguascalientes, or the EZLN calendar for 1997 with the Thoughts of Sub-comandante ...”

“... warts and all. To do otherwise would leave our history and future diminished.’ A month later, Oliver Dowden, then culture secretary and now co-chair of the Conservative Party, made a similar point: ‘Proud and confident nations face their past squarely; they do not seek to run from or airbrush the history upon which they are founded … Purging ...”

“... medium, sound. There is just one easy place to go to find out about all of these things at once: Oliver Sacks’s new book of three essays. Like all his writing, the essays are engaging, funny, informed, humane and speculative. One, a brilliant piece of journalism, describes the 1988 revolution – the word used by every deaf person I know – at Gallaudet ...”

“... it would have been just as effective. Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with ...”

“... safe seat out of Labour’s grip. The defeat, according to a contemporary Nationalist observer, Oliver Brown, sent a shiver along the Labour benches ‘looking for a spine to run up’. The Scottish Labour vote was managed at this point by Willie Ross, who was secretary of state for Scotland between 1964 and 1970, and again from 1974 until the retirement of ...”