“... unique not only in the number of its inhabitants, but also in the range of its functions. Pace Dr Johnson, there was not in London all that life could afford: but it provided more opportunities for living and buying than all provincial English towns combined. Unfailingly attractive, and inexorably centripetal, London dominated England to an extent not ...”

“... collapse assumed that the party’s backbenchers would take the opportunity to dispatch Johnson in its wake. Some deposed council leaders did call for his head. But, so far, letters to the chair of the 1922 Committee don’t seem to be pouring in. Perhaps Tory MPs are persuaded by the implausible argument that changing leaders while Russia’s war ...”

“... the four judges adopted a series of very different arguments to justify killing Rosie. Justice Johnson, who heard the initial application, thought of the children as having not one body but two: Gracie owned the heart and lungs, Rosie did not. ‘Gracie’s body’ was supplying Rosie’s with oxygen. At first he wanted to think of Gracie’s body as ...”

“... of fidelity and straight dealing. He has inherited a crime empire from his boss and mentor, Bumpy Johnson, who dies at the start of the film. Lucas was his driver, collector and hit man: in a shocking brief pre-credit sequence, still working for Johnson, he soaks a man in petrol and sets him alight, prior to shooting him ...”

“... the sharing of risk.None of this could be further from the idea of society that propelled Boris Johnson to power, and which is all but useless to him now. Brexit was fuelled by a desire for the society of a collectively imagined past, for a ‘nation’. While Remainers spoke of GDP and other macroeconomic indicators, Leavers offered the cultural symbols of ...”

“... May is alive to the potential of this form of politics. ‘Imagine Trump doing Brexit …’ Boris Johnson mused last year. ‘He’d go in bloody hard … There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.’ This is presumably what Trump has ...”

“... trade, being marked by a kind of anti-intellectual wisdom, schooled in that harsh world Samuel Johnson endlessly held up to the face of the bon ton: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.’ Porter’s 18th century forms a counter-world to conventional evocations of that age. The expression ‘Georgian’ is meant to convey an 18th century with all the ...”

“... on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation. Dr Johnson, one of Enright’s touchstones, records how he was so shocked by Cordelia’s death in King Lear that he could never bear to reread the play’s last scenes until forced to as a Shakespeare editor. In ‘Poetical Justice’ Enright’s speaker presents ...”

“... life are tellingly invoked. Then there is an amazingly learned search for the sources of David’s Oath of the Horatii. The trail leads through Gluck, Garrick, the ballet-master Noverre, Lavoisier, Beaumarchais and (less of a displaced person now, than when Wind was writing in 1941) Salieri. It is nard to imagine a reader with any developed interest ...”

“... Announcing the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, Andrew Marr was pleased to be able to say that none of the shortlisted books was the obvious result of a publisher’s ‘wheeze’, or the so-called biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20 ...”

“... reduced in scale. In hindsight, the only figure who commands one’s unequivocal admiration is David Steel. Steel was shrewd enough to want the Four to found their own party rather than join the Liberals. He somehow jollied along the grandee Jenkins, made friends of Williams and Rodgers and, incredibly, even supported several years in harness with the ...”

“... what they want, a Democrat has to: that was his line. Hillary Clinton also backed the generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the chief of staff Admiral Mullen, in their request for 40,000 more troops. Indeed she supported them more strongly than Gates did. Jones sought to help Obama by running interference with the Pentagon, but Obama preferred ...”

“... opponent in 1964, the ultra-conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. In the event, Lyndon Johnson was not inclined to risk what promised (and turned out) to be a landslide victory over Goldwater, and turned his debate challenge down. Not surprisingly, Nixon rejected calls to put himself through another series of debates in 1968, when his opponent was ...”

“... Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT–T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by affinities with the art of ...”

“... On 16 June 1783, Samuel Johnson was rendered speechless by a stroke. His first action was not to try croaking for a doctor, but to compose a prayer in Latin: ‘The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.’ Johnson was relieved that he could still pray in Latin, but the greater part of his relief was that he was still enough of a critic to know that his verses were not much good ...”