“... to British naval supremacy and a local hilltop was equipped with big guns pointing towards the North Sea. By the time of the Second World War, barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns had been added to the defences, while a narrow-gauge railway ran around the coast to a pier that had been built to ship arms and other supplies to the fortified islands out in ...”

“... like beasts – a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life.’ Oliver Cromwell described his slaughter of 3500 Irish men at Drogheda as ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches’. The Welsh, according to the Reverend William Richards in Wallography, his vicious travelogue of 1682, ‘are much addicted to ...”

“... up for him by Charles Eliot Norton, 16 years his senior, who had published his early essays in the North American Review and was one of the founders of the Nation. Norton and his family were also in Europe at the time of James’s visit. (Some of James’s most stilted and insufferable letters in these two volumes were written to members of the Norton ...”

“... situation of the American colonies, they were going to choose them whether George III and Lord North liked it or not. There was no point in arguing with that political fact: ‘I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.’ Burke’s opposition to the American war has a further dimension which comes close to a blanket ...”

“... published image of the Greek Revival building by William Wilkins which stretches across the north side of Trafalgar Square is an engraving that shows it under construction in 1836, with the dignity of its architecture masked (as it so often is today) by hoardings covered with noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort ...”

“... that must be taken seriously. ‘A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous line, which dates from 1933, was, as Black reminds us, quite possibly a reference to Theodore Roosevelt rather than Franklin. But FDR was certainly no systematic thinker. Asked to define his philosophy, he said: ‘I’m a ...”

“... new films. One night, without any warning, it showed the naked fight scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women in Love. I was pretty interested in the clip, but I knew to keep quiet afterwards. Modesty was a primary virtue at the school: there were doors on each shower and we all slept in cubicles. In the debating society everything was open to ...”

“... only to secure their outward conformity: a position arguably more tolerant than that of his enemy Oliver Cromwell, who, while indifferent to outward conformity, wanted proof of men’s inward orthodoxy. In any case, how Laudian was Laud? Trevor-Roper indicates that the discrediting of Laud’s ecclesiastical policies followed less from his own implementation ...”

“... the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial Mephistopheles at the heart of the indictment. ‘Greed is good,’ purrs the villain, Gordon Gekko. Greed might just save that ‘malfunctioning corporation ...”

“... gets in the way. And it’s somehow all too easy. Both the 17-year-old Elio and his older lover, Oliver, are flawless, but with no anguish to their affection. Nor is there any lack of understanding from the boy’s parents, his father particularly, with this being singled out as evidence of the film’s maturity. It’s quite chaste, very beautiful and it ...”

“... producing – among other things – an eccentric satire on racism and a Parisian rewrite of Oliver Twist. The initial response to The Roots of Heaven wasn’t universally admiring: the left complained about Gaullism and sentimental humanitarianism, the right sniffed at Gary’s un-French origins by censuring his verb conjugations, and the avant-garde ...”

“... the Coast Guard, and the boy’s first nine years were spent in the port town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His mother, Wendy, was descended from two passengers on the Mayflower: Priscilla Mullins, ‘the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose ...”

“... sailed for New York with their baby daughter, Caroline, in search of better wages. They lived on Oliver Street in Lower Manhattan, and Henry found work in a tailor’s shop. Two years after they arrived, he died of typhoid. A widow with a young child, Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in ...”

“... Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little ...”

“... war on’, and he takes this passage as a prime example: Eliot, he says, is to be seen ‘adopting Oliver Goldsmith’s line … and then undoing it by adding the innocuous little word “and”’. The little word undoes the old rhythm of the original and scuppers the rhyme scheme too: more, it leaves the little word isolated, as though in sympathy with the ...”