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“... in his own time. This particular biography calls for even greater respect because its author, Oliver Mac Donagh, has established himself as the most incisive and (with the late F.S.L. Lyons) the most prolific Irish-born historian of his generation. The compound is preferred over the simple adjective to describe Mac Donagh not because there is any doubt ...”

“... have a history and a context. But this is not the sort of answer we get from either D.M. Thomas or Oliver Stone. Their suggestion is simpler. There is no paranoia, or paranoia is everywhere. For Thomas, this means anything goes (‘since fiction is a kind of dream, and history is a kind of dream, and this is both’). For Stone, it means whoever is passionate ...”

“... a billboard appears featuring a huge photograph of Ray drinking the beer, smiling and ‘picnic-ready’, next to the words: ‘Shop a looter.’ From this point on, his fate as a comic scapegoat seems assured. The Adulterants is brief and accessible, but very carefully crafted: it is Dunthorne’s first novel since Wild Abandon (2011), and he has said that ...”

“... that Cromwell once called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can believe that one, too.When Oliver first elbowed his way into both the Short Parliament (which sat for three weeks in 1640) and the Long, he was turning forty, a plain man in a plain cloth suit with a speck or two of blood on his collarband, ‘his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice ...”

“... may not have seen the struggle in quite the cataclysmic terms the editors assume. Indeed, he was ready to concede some validity to forms – ‘not but that there is some power [of the spirit] in the form, but ’tis a weak and inferior appearance.’ More certainly, as a textual scholar himself, Warr would not have been impressed by the way his editors ...”

“... translucent beauty of the unborn. Standing, Walking On the 16th day after surgery I was judged ‘ready to walk’. What would I walk with? How could I walk? How could I stand on, let alone move, a ghostly lump of jelly, a nothing, hanging loosely from my hip? And even if, stiffened by its carapace of chalk, this preposterous appendage could support me, how ...”

“... among the fenlands and in the marshy ground of the Thames Valley, it claimed both James I and Oliver Cromwell. Theories about its origin have been legion: in the Middle Ages it was thought to be due to the action of planets and comets, to electrical storms or rains of ‘fever poison’; the Chinese thought it was caused by disharmony between Yin and ...”

“... It’s true that as a child she spent part of World War One in Ireland while her father, Oliver (everyone in her immediate family was either Oliver or Olivia), was on active service. She later kept quiet about this part of her life, both because it revealed her age – she preferred people to think that she was ...”

“... persist, and no other form of academic history achieves as wide a readership as biography. Oliver MacDonagh and Owen Dudley Edwards offer new interpretations of two men, each of whom dominated the politics of his time, Daniel O’Connell and Eamon de Valera. Their relevance to the current crisis is most apparent in the way each had to come to terms ...”

“... that we will have to wait for the accession of Prince William to find the first descendant of Oliver Cromwell to wear the English Crown? The loyal addresses to Richard Cromwell, though a potentially suspect source, do not suggest that the Protectorate fell because of any lack of hold on public opinion. Indeed, it is even possible that the Cromwellian ...”

“... Waite was held hostage in Beirut, journalists found themselves asking what his links were with Oliver North. I have on my desk the daubs of a class of five-year-olds from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same organisation as McCarthy’s ...”

“... analyses the decision (and its author) in his chapter on the law governing Parliament in the Oliver and Drewry volume. Part of the reason for the decision, and not a wholly discreditable one, is that in the absence of a constitutional arbiter the courts and Parliament have since the last century had to maintain a careful stand-off. But one result has ...”

“... His cousin Oliver Baldwin described Kipling’s story ‘Mary Postgate’ as ‘the wickedest story in the world’. It did shock its readers very much, but it is not entirely easy to determine just what the shocking element was, perhaps still is. Told with a subdued but cheerful elegance a little in the manner of Jane Austen’s novels, which Kipling much admired, it is a tale about a virtuous spinster companion during the Great War, whose employer’s nephew in the RFC is killed on a training flight ...”

“... a professor of biology at the University of Sussex who was involved in the Krefeld study, and Oliver Milman, an environment correspondent at the Guardian, are both convinced that we can’t afford to wait for more facts to emerge. Their books cover much the same ground, though with different emphases. Both make the point that insects are an integral part ...”

“... in a return to courtly blank verse: I ask, that I might waken reverence And bid the check be ready with a blush.      (New Arden) Again Palmer sees (or hears) what is happening; Muir both obscures the pause and destroys the effect of ‘debonair’ insolence by giving Aeneas the line ‘Ay. I ask, that I might waken reverence.’ Nor is the effect ...”