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“... 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 ...”

“... non-Portuguese sources. Reading MacQueen and Cann, I was sadly reminded of some remarks made by Roland Oliver. Looking back in 1997 over his long and influential career of academic and practical innovation in African historiography, Oliver felt obliged to note that ‘Europe seemed to be turning increasingly ...”

“... after influencing virtually every major figure in anthropology from Malinowski to Audrey Richards. Roland Oliver, who in the Fifties pioneered the serious study of African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has recently identified diffusionism as the biggest intellectual obstacle to be overcome in winning recognition for the new ...”

“... was 23 and rated No 1. The new book belongs to the genre of defensive biography. It is as though Oliver had written a life of Roland: the wise, steady friend standing up for the brilliant, wayward hero. The comparison may sound pretentious, but then Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations ...”

“... Debunking explorers seems to have become a popular pastime. In recent years, Oliver Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable ...”

“... with such help. In his introduction to this bibliography Mr Laurence likens himself to Childe Roland who ‘to the dark tower came’. It is difficult to know precisely what to make of this. Are we to deduce that, like Edgar, he has all these years pretended to be mad? Or that the bibliographer’s field has been as ravaged by fearful elements as King ...”

“... Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never secret, being set out in Ransome’s own articles for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian (his early stuff was often reprinted in the New York Times as ...”

“... all, be taken as an image of the poet as spiritual quester, a fusion of the Browning of Childe Roland and Mallarmé, possessed of a bloom absent from all bouquets, the meaning of which is death. Later in the same poem, the ironically inflected romanticism of Mallarmé’s ‘Brise Marine’ is echoed in the speaker’s vision of ‘a dainty Victorian ship ...”

“... some other.’ This will seem a mild complaint to Richard Baxter after his fierce clashes with Oliver Cromwell, and his denunciation by Judge Jeffreys: Oy! Oy! What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain that he could not conform? Richard, Richard, dost thou think we’ll hear thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an old ...”

“... Joyce, one of whose brothers was Archbishop of Armagh, a seat he resigned to another brother, Roland, who was confessor to Edward II of England – no doubt an interesting job to hold where gossip was concerned. And no wonder that JS’s son James not only owned a copy of the coat of arms, framed as a decoration, but had it stamped on the cover of a ...”

“... to fully measure the extent to which China’s economic miracle was enabled by Western waste,’ Oliver Franklin-Wallis writes in Wasteland (2023). Such cheap raw material proved irresistible to the country’s growing manufacturing base, even as polluted waste water flowed into Chinese towns and dioxins killed off livestock populations. But as purity ...”

“... sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is impossible to open your mouth without quoting. As Roland Barthes and others have pointed out, the phrase ‘I love you’ is always a citation, indeed one of the most shopsoiled citations of all, even when it is sincerely meant. For the romantically inclined, this opens up an ominous gap between experience and ...”

“... who were, in any case, in decline. This was evidenced by their use of contraception, according to Oliver St John Gogarty, who said, during the 1929 Séanad debate on the Censorship of Publications Act that ‘the English government has practically told the unemployed that they should not cumber the earth.’ The Act would help the Irish poor avoid this fate ...”

“... want to make their characters more distinctive. Flaubert is the usual example, as he was for Roland Barthes in ‘The Reality Effect’. Barthes explains the function of the ‘useless detail’ in Flaubert: we don’t need to know that a barometer sat on the piano in Mme Aubain’s room, but the particularity (any particularity) sends the message that a ...”

“... for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was commissioned. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s ...”