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“... a reflection of the hold which Eton has over Britain’s Establishment that a talented writer like Richard Ollard can devote a year or more of his time to a book about a single school during a short period of its history. Where else in the world could such a book be written and not gather dust at the back of old-fashioned bookshops? ...”

“... of Bowra. But it is the Order of Merit that bulks ever larger, as it does also in Richard Ollard’s biography of A.L. Rowse, A Man of Contradictions. Rowse appears never to have got over the OM awarded to Veronica Wedgwood: ‘ “My OM!” as he grew, with resentful jealousy, accustomed to exclaim.’ Annan, too, scrutinises its ...”

“... did write at least one good poem, how many of us can say that?’ Fitzgerald wrote to Richard Ollard at Collins, who was pessimistic about the prospects for a biography. At odds with the ineffectualness of Fitzgerald’s self-portrait is the passionate determination with which she pursued her subjects, wooing the recalcitrant owners of ...”

“... within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, ...”

“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of ...”

“... worked with Randolph S. on editing the C papers, here useful on C and social reform; the navalist Richard Ollard, who has written on the Churchill-impacted Admirals Fisher and Cunningham (and the Navy), John Grigg (and Lloyd George), etc. The platoon’s roll goes on, with Gordon A. Craig, America’s Germanist and Prussianologue naturally offering us ...”

“... The ‘tragedy’ of Arminianism was that in the 1620s, under the leadership first of Richard Neile and then more decisively of William Laud, it was annexed to Charles I’s programme of political ‘absolutism’. Trevor-Roper does not describe the precise content of that programme. If it existed, then the constitutional objectives of the Puritan ...”

“... Coote’s recent biography, or the sensitive but work-obsessed administrator who figures in Richard Ollard’s excellent but now rather elderly Life. Tomalin cannot compete with Ollard’s lovingly detailed understanding of Pepys’s work as a Naval administrator, and ...”

“... making’ of Sir Arthur Bryant’s three-volume life – that is, a sort of apprentice Pepys only. Richard Ollard’s Pepys (1974) is less strangely proportioned from this point of view, but again there is a deliberate attempt to set the familiar Pepys in a context of broader aspiration and achievement. Much of the new Companion volume rehearses the ...”