“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... very long adult life, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems to have been a happy man. Pritchett’s son, Oliver, later recalled that he and his sister grew up ‘in a word factory’. ‘The handwritten pages, covered in revisions, crossings out, second and third thoughts, and sideways writing in the margins, were given to my mother to type. They would be revised ...”

“... title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off ...”