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“... in London. Rosamond Lehmann had praised it; Leonard Woolf wanted to publish it. The story was Olivia; the author, anonymous on publication in 1949, was Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey’s sister. Olivia is a piece of spirited homage, by a woman both spirited and prone to homage. Dorothy Strachey had some of her ...”

“... novels nowadays are just travel books,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’ She hadn’t noticed that the setting of The Great Fortune is in fact Romania. But she had a point. Journeys, voluntary and enforced, are big in Olivia Manning’s work, as they ...”

“... wide-ranging study since Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties. John Harwood’s biography of Olivia Shakespear is elegant and thorough. She was one of that aspiring multitude whose fate it was and is to add to the unthinkably vast piles of unread, unremembered novels; hers are discussed here, but it is for her association with Yeats that she is now ...”

“... of the car he was driving. Max had told the police that he wanted to kill himself. The daughter, Olivia, has come back from a school trip to France thinner and with a new best friend, Emily. ‘At school some people think we’re bitches,’ Olivia explains to Cece, ‘but we’re not. It’s that we don’t like to be ...”

“... All that is left of a person is their name,’ Olivia Mostacilla told me during my month in Colombia, the first time I’d been back in two years. She wasn’t referring to the paramilitary massacres, which have stopped in the past few months because of the on-going ‘demobilisation’ of the paras organised by President Uribe’s government, but to the craze for plastic surgery, especially the variety known as lipo-escultura or ‘fat sculpture ...”

“... lexicon: overwhelming love is like a rough and immense sea in Orsino’s opening speech, Olivia weeps saltwater tears, Maria and Andrew parry ‘dry jests’, Cesario is ‘standing water’ and encouraged to ‘hoist sail’: ‘no, good swabber,’ he replies, ‘I am to hull it here a little longer.’ The maritime imagery continues. This is a ...”

“... but in the end Waugh’s work belongs within the realistic tradition of the English novel. So does Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, which is the only other lengthy attempt by an English novelist to handle part of World War Two as a theme. (Anthony Powell’s three relevant volumes in The Music of Time are too closely woven into the rest of the series to be ...”

“... The title of Olivia Manning’s last book, from Housman’s heroic-ironic epitaph on an earlier war, announces a summing-up: the last volume of a trilogy, the trilogy itself the continuation of a previous one; the final flowing out to sea of a roman-fleuve of six volumes, completed just before the author’s death ...”

“... Maria Edgeworth’s epistolary novel Leonora (1806). In Edgeworth the Lady Susan character is Lady Olivia, a sophisticated Englishwoman long domiciled in France, who has separated from her husband, acquired a lover and left her daughter while she visits an old schoolfriend in England. Though advised that she is a ‘coquette’, Leonora and her husband take ...”

“... in the end. Perhaps the strongest story is of the Land family, whose youngest child, Olivia, disappeared one summer’s morning from a tent in the garden, leaving no clue. Jackson is consulted thirty years later by two of Olivia’s sisters; Blue Mouse, a stuffed toy in whom ...”

“... increases with the arrival of Francesca (Miles’s sister) to recuperate after her illness, and of Olivia (Benjy’s sister), who has been invited to spend the summer at Bly before going up to Cambridge. The screw turns and after 33 years of unblemished bookishness Miles turns to screwing. He sleeps with Benjy, which proves a revelation, and one night, when ...”

“... a perfect example.) Marcus ends by quoting from A Room of One’s Own the sentence, ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ which Virginia Woolf gave as an example of the kind of sentence she wanted to see more of in women’s fiction, for so long dominated by women only ‘in their relation to men’. It’s a sentence, Marcus observes, that has been milked for lesbian ...”

“... in it may be the only way of getting things done. The existence of Crudo, the first novel by Olivia Laing, who has written three books of non-fiction, was first announced on Twitter on 1 August 2017: Tipsy over dinner, I have come up with a quartet of novels which I am going to write in the first year of the next four decades. Or forget entirely by ...”

“... turns out, is betrothed to another, the Quakerish, quivering and ever sincere Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland). For the rest of the film, although she marries three other men (the first out of pique, the second out of necessity), Scarlett nurses her ardour for Ashley, convinced that he feels the same way about her, and is restrained only by his sense ...”

“... is rumoured to be portraying Mata Hari in a Robert Altman TV film, and Helen Fielding has created Olivia Joules, in her Bond-parody follow-up to Bridget Jones, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.† There’s nothing of the Amazon about Olivia: she’s a curvy blonde, wears ...”