“... As a boy, though, for me its most numinous holding was a large felt hat reputed to be that of Oliver Cromwell with a bullet hole in the crown to prove it. Visiting Temple Newsam was always a treat, as it still is more than half a century later. Back in 1947, though, with the country in the throes of the postwar economic crisis, the push was on for more ...”

“... at the end slips clean away from him. But Moran is also Master Owl, poet to a medieval chieftain, Oliver (the same Oliver, it seems, that the book is dedicated to, so I have to leave him to laugh this out with the author), and in this character he talks beguilingly and not unlike Anna Livia Plurabelle: ‘Moll, your hand is ...”

“... the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the Orphan that ...”

“... analogies of subject that focus in several instances considerable differences of treatment. Oliver Sacks’s stirring ‘The Leg’, a true story of paralysis which deals in eloquently measured prose with, the author’s loss of the sense of his left leg, and which itself teaches by precise and humane example the ‘conjunction of science and ...”

“... irrelevant, that is, to the proper concerns of history? Some of this still lingers. Professor Oliver’s new summary of sociopolitical development since remote times – above all, since the onset of metal-using technologies – is all the more persuasive for the prudence that has marked his style of work. Not for him the early illuminations of ...”

“... they were making their way home after an exciting night out. They included brambles and chartreuse green cymbidium orchids in trailing arrangements that brought passers-by to a halt. Spry’s reputation was made. She worked with Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel and began to acquire her own celebrity clients. When Beaton ...”

“... Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King Oliver’; and the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, which was a notable touring venue for musicians in the 1930s and was, when Fisher visited, being demolished. This was Fisher’s first visit to America. He was already fifty. His plane touched down at ...”

“... It depends, as Gray delicately indicates, what you mean by ‘kiss’; and when the unreliable Oliver St John Gogarty says Moore was still a virgin at 80 it depends what you mean by virgin. Moore’s own contribution to the subject (or one of them) runs: Women seemed to me so beautiful and desirable – men so ugly, almost revolting ... I was absorbed in ...”

“... growth of the global recycling industry. It’s tempting to laugh at this near-parodic display of green libertarianism: commercial actors, unhindered by state legislation, corralling one another to redirect capital flows by way of cryptocurrency, a technology so energy-intensive that its use in the scheme threatens to overwrite any projected ecological ...”

“... in a dying kingdom, still fantastic in bronze or golden ruff, with hanging sleeves of ragged green, still aping fertility’s magnificence – bold and brilliant in the last warmth of the sun’s shorter journeys, are either spurred to this last acrid excess of beauty by decay’s imminent arrival or are quite unaware of the frost’s fingers, still ...”

“... alongside Ludlow’s, on Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Whalley was a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell and his was the fourth signature on the warrant. Goffe, his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the fortieth.After the Restoration in May 1660, the signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in ...”

“... in the elderly and partially sighted would much later be named. This famous case introduces Oliver Sacks’s survey of hallucinations, and sets his terms of engagement with the subject in distinctive ways. First, it predates the adoption of ‘hallucination’ as a medical term, and in that way escapes some of the ideological pressure the word would ...”

“... own defence of publishing so many of Cromwell’s letters in his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) is pertinent: If each Letter look dim, and have little light, after all study; – yet let the Historical reader reflect, such light as it has cannot be disputed at all. These words, expository of that day and hour, ...”

“... sneaking admiration. True, Sam is in many ways an offputting specimen: he dyes his hair virulently green; he talks in an almost incomprehensible adolescent jargon; and he gets his kicks from stealing bicycles and from other kinds of petty juvenile dishonesty. But with ATE we come to sympathise with Sam’s view of the world and his own sense of purpose. We ...”

“... Congregationalist . . . the Congregationalists are the oldest Nonconformists, descendants of the Oliver Cromwell Independents.’ The 17th-century roots of his early religious experience provided a cultural authority that Lawrence valued. It was a continuity channelled through the texts of the Bible, with its numinous landscapes that ‘never existed on ...”