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“... which is about as much fun as an hour in a bank, and is even decorated in the subtle beige and green shades of money. You could spend a weekend in New York for the price of a Prada item. The security guard is the most attentive employee, and the buying is hyper-discreet. The best thing is the packaging: a chic black box, a creamy white bag with Prada ...”

“... of knowledge and learning. And of course Sinclair himself has actually walked upon these byways green: the weird journeyings that criss-cross his writings are full of details of landscapes and earth-swellings, ‘promiscuous sycamores, knocked-off marble doves, nettles, ivy, overgrown paths’ that read with the precision of an Ordnance Survey grid ...”

“... years earlier in County Sligo. Her father, Edward Gilbert, was a soldier. Her mother, Elizabeth Oliver, was the product of an illegitimate union between Charles Silver Oliver, an MP, and a local woman called Mary Green (who was indeed a little bit Spanish). When Lola was two, the whole ...”

“... murder, the first case in any self-respecting compilation. In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Crime, Oliver Cyriax comments that ‘thirty years ago, it seemed inconceivable that a Briton might hang for a crime he was tied to by almost no evidence.’ Now we have no such misconceptions. Railways smoothed the way for state executioners, hangmen with Bibles on ...”

“... in letters to his niece. The evidence was remarkably and convincingly assembled in 1980 by Hermia Oliver (Flaubert and an English Governess), on whom Lottman naturally relies. But the simple insertion of Juliet Herbert into the novelist’s larger life (instead of her standing as a story by herself) allows us to judge more fairly how much weight to give her ...”

“... a reversion to normality or simply one more volatile experiment. The period following the death of Oliver Cromwell had been one of governments a-go-go, with at least nine separate constitutional configurations in the year prior to Restoration, some of them also greeted with bonfires and bells. Charles II’s great challenge was to turn momentary sentiment into ...”

“... were sharply cut; the spies laid their schemes not in smoke-filled rooms but by the flickering green light of computer screens. Still, it was comfort TV. It depicted a world that looked just like the real one except that nothing in it would actually come to pass. The voters weren’t about to embrace socialism, forcing the establishment to do its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there to the substance of the tree, as far as the crown. The leaflets of the ash are a lovely mid-green and in summer, standing under a healthy tree with plenty of leaf, you are in a cool, lit space with a tattered sky above you and greenery round your feet: light clambers down through the foliage and plays on the ground. Constable’s ash trees – and ...”

“... Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James ...”

“... Riding and probably not even in the country. No wonder Corbyn is ahead of the rest.1 September. Oliver Sacks dies, my first memory of whom was as an undergraduate in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a ...”

“... and over the airwaves: from the English Civil War to the Victorian town hall and onto the green belt, from Newton to Darwin, the Levellers to the Labour Party. Past history became present politics as he campaigned for New Labour, joined its think-tanks and sought (as yet in vain) a safe parliamentary seat. Sometimes his judgment has erred. Comparing ...”

“... to be convinced that he had sexual intercourse with his male friends (with, for instance, Oliver Messel, of whom she said, in feigned anger, ‘I hope he sucks you dry’), and partly by her own brazen infidelities, which led to her having almost as many abortions as periods. She was good-looking. The divorce and its aftermath came on the last of the ...”

“... they also portray the animals in their natural habitat – the grouse shelters in his covert, the green woodpecker perches on a gnarled branch, waders strut by streams, while the marine birds are framed by craggy rocks and pebble beaches. Most of the best engravings include a figure, incident or building which draws the viewer’s eye beyond and behind the ...”

“... young Englishman’ flops into the dining-car seat opposite the author and reveals himself as Oliver Myers, an Egyptologist with a genuine belief in the ghouls and djinns of the Arabian desert. Next we encounter, in the most casual manner, the author’s wife Ernestina, who comes from an extended Latin family somewhere in the neighbourhood of the British ...”