Those who have had the privilege of knowing David Ogg as a tutor or a colleague will not need to be reminded of those qualities of wit and intellectual elegance, of originality of thought and expression, of common sense applied in an uncommon way, that characterise his talk as unmistakenly as his writing. The deceptive ease with which his exact scholarship and wide erudition have been put at our disposal is no small part of the pleasant debt we all owe him...It would be an imperceptive reader who failed to notice that in both the fields that Ogg has made his own, the England of Charles II and the Europe of Louis XIV, he has challenged both the accepted historiography of the period and the fashionable portrayal of the two eponymous figures of the age. It could be imperceptive, but it would not be impossible. The modulations of irony, the subtle effects of tone, the humility in which, above all, the style reveals the man, will be lost on such as prefer vulgar colours, familiar platitudes, and the techniques of self-advertisement in which modern scholarship can report such notable advances. But the continued and increasing success of ''Europe in the Seventeenth Century'' and ''England in the Reign of Charles II'' gives good ground for believing that () rare qualities...have been recognised and valued by a far wider public. Of the influence exerted by these books on students of the period there can be no doubt.〔H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard, ‘Preface’, in Bell and Ollard (eds.), ''Historical Essays. 1600-1750. Presented to David Ogg'' (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1963), p. vii.〕