David Ogg (19 June 1887 - 28 March 1965) was a Scottish historian who specialised in the history of England during the reign of Charles II and of Europe dominated by Louis XIV of France.
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 had 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.
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 the rare qualities of which his pupils at Oxford and in America have been the chief beneficiaries have been recognised and valued by a far wider public.