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“... that we can’t always keep our bearings. One is astonished, for instance, at how the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, no ordinary mother, was restricted, even in the arty society that she and Olivia frequented, by the still rigid conventions that wheeled her, uncomplaining but always chaperoned and often bored to ...”

“... shouldn’t do this! Oh vicious God, I will fight you to the bitter end – !’ The translator, Olivia Milburn, has done her best, but there isn’t a lot to work with. Eventually the narrator finds Rong’s notebook and returns it to his wife, then asks her if she ever really loved the geeky saviour of the nation. ‘I love him as I love my country,’ she ...”

“... into the air and write their lyrics. ‘Writers, even the most socially gifted and established,’ Olivia Laing writes in The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (Canongate, £20), ‘must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and witness.’ Her book is an elegant rumination on what it is that leads writers to take up ...”

“... at a local printing office. The Florentine dictations stopped with the death of Twain’s wife, Olivia, in June 1904, the second of two powerful blows struck Twain by death. The first had been the sudden and unexpected death of his daughter Susy at 24 in 1896. Twain was in London when the news arrived, ‘standing in our dining room thinking of nothing in ...”

“... the Wade-Dahl-Till valve was used to treat three thousand children). Then in 1962 their daughter Olivia contracted measles and died suddenly of encephalitis at the same age – just seven – at which Dahl’s sister had died. Dahl never talked about his grief for his daughter, though he kept a notebook in his desk drawer headed ‘...”

“... friendship with Yeats is covered in detail – as are his associations with everyone from Olivia Shakespear to Rabindranath Tagore to Harriet Monroe. Capsule biographies of everyone and their lover (and their literary rag) are provided at each turn. It seems that in Carr, modernism has found its recording angel. By leaving nothing out, Carr ensures ...”

“... interests and powers served by the proliferation of hermeneutic techniques’. Jerome McGann and Olivia Smith are two good critics, both Americans publishing in England, who fall in with Mitchell’s injunction to ‘historicise’. Each regards a work of the past as both an individual literary performance and an event occurring in space and time. They think ...”

“... fictional young novelist, Mary Carmichael, and which gave her hope for the future: ‘Chloe liked Olivia.’ This sentence fills Woolf with wonder: ‘For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and ...”

“... her along to see the film being made; they were shooting a classroom scene between Mulligan and Olivia Williams, who was playing her English teacher. ‘Do you think he was a paedophile?’ Williams asked. And without a second’s thought I answered yes. Amanda Posey, the co-producer of the film, almost fainted. Apparently this had been a huge problem all ...”

“... it new, Yeats had iconic status. George’s mother knew him: her second husband’s sister was Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy’s mother, with whom Yeats had had an affair and remained on good terms. George met Yeats in 1911. She remembered vividly that she saw him and recognised him one morning in the British Museum, and later that same day while he was ...”

“... though this hero, whose life is ‘easy and cluttered with luck’, and his beautiful girlfriend Olivia – who was the child star of a famously successful commercial, and supported her whole family when she was four – are the dream-offspring of those earlier Simpson characters. Ann in The Lost Father says: ‘My mother and I ... both believed that the ...”

“... own unhappiness and the grittier mood of the years just before the war. It continues the story of Olivia, now living and working alone in London. Rollo, her unattainable man, now married, becomes her lover, his appeal sexual but also social. He comes from that secure world of the upper classes, of expensive restaurants, large cars, ‘good soap and clean ...”

“... is another remarkable figure in the movie: Lang’s wife, Ruth, played with edgy, snarky flair by Olivia Williams. We know she’s the force behind his career, we know she’s jealous now of the bossy personal assistant played by Kim Cattrall. But Williams is so angry and funny and unpredictable that the life of her character seems to escape the plot and the ...”

“... because they reminded them of someone they liked, in life, in fiction or in a Shakespeare comedy: Olivia, for example. Parents insisted on children being christened with a particular form of name, not Ellen but Nellie, a name-form that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or ...”

“... that she had never yet in all her life experienced with anyone,’ we are told of absconding Olivia in Heat and Dust. Actually, it was unnecessary for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to spell out, and in such novelettish terms, what we might have gathered for ourselves – an odd lapse in an otherwise evocative and compact work. Such romantic entanglements, we ...”