“... the ‘Christian’. Thus, common sense protests that it is at least strongly likely that Samuel Johnson, who was a good Christian and wrote good verse, wrote some good Christian verse. And in fact his elegy ‘On the death of Mr Robert Levet’ (which is included neither in Davie’s anthology nor in Cecil’s) seems to me a very good Christian poem, not ...”

“... may be an exaggeration. He did nothing to hide his distaste for the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, and – more in keeping with his earlier sentiments – lent his name to public statements protesting against the Vietnam War, and organised a group of historians who prepared a report for the House impeachment committee on abuses of ...”

“... children, both legitimate and illegitimate’, may have been the father of a second ‘“Benjamin Johnson fil. Ben”, baptised at St Martin-in-the-Fields’ in 1610. And on the matter of what might have constituted traumatic experience for Jonson: he had at this point lost his own father before he was born, fought and ...”

“... in the United States has achieved or been placed in a certain artistic niche,’ James Weldon Johnson wrote, at around the same time, in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922): When he is thought of artistically, it is as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or as a more or less pathetic figure. The picture of him is ...”

“... is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little better informed. Some antiquarians may have noted that the names of the days of the week bore witness to a pagan history (though an Anglo-Saxon, not a Scandinavian one). But neither Vikings nor sagas existed in learned or popular ...”

“... that it pursues extravagant metaphorical connections, in the manner of those Elizabethan poets Dr Johnson was so sniffy about. By the time she came to write her fourth novel, Written on the Body (1992), perhaps Winterson was beginning to find all these fancy plots a bit beside the point and babyish, which of course in a way they were. So WoB is largely ...”

“... fight off the threat of defeat in the Brexit referendum. Obama is greeted by an op-ed from Boris Johnson in the Telegraph attacking him for removing a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office. ‘Some said,’ Johnson wrote, ‘that it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British ...”

“... its great English Augustan phase, and in this and other ways a model for Dryden, Swift, Pope and Johnson. He is remembered in the textbooks, but he has always seemed too problematic for canonical assimilation. As a satirist, he was the last great practitioner of the ‘rough’ vitriolic style deemed to derive from ‘satyrs’, and Pope thought him ...”

“... and ‘a less charismatic Gaddafi’ (though French intelligence is now working with him and Boris Johnson has been pushing for Britain to revisit the matter). Spurned by the US, he has turned to Russia for backing and was recently photographed in Moscow wearing a ushanka. A classic war on terror rhetorician, he has been taking on Islamic State, non-IS ...”

“... the landscape is not as bleak as he suggests. Paulin finds room for two such poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, though I might not have echoed his choice from the latter: the 82 uses of ‘fucking’ in 50 lines would perhaps be more effective in performance than on the printed page. One of the main difficulties for theorists of an organic ...”

“... them, Professor Jerome Ch’en, writing on the Chinese Communist movement up to 1927; Professor C. Martin Wilbur, who describes the creation of the revolutionary movement and the drive to unify China in the five critical years between 1923 and 1928; and Professor Marie-Claire Bergère, who examines the rise and political failure of the Chinese bourgeoisie ...”

“... Devil’s doings but as products of cerebral abnormalities. The great Parisian nuroanatomist Jean-Martin Charcot experimented on hysterics’ reactions to pain stimuli, using hypnosis to induce anaesthesias and hyperaesthesias. Others explored the ‘phantom organ’ and, conversely, the loss of sensation in an intact part – occurrences given an ...”

“... as one big revolutionary cocktail party, with people like Oliver Tambo, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King in attendance. Accra quickly became a magnet for liberation movements across the continent, but it also attracted spies, war criminals and corrupt businessmen. Malcolm X remembered sitting in a hotel dining room there, listening to Americans ...”

“... continued to falter, it might be this: the younger generation of directors (Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese especially), who were drawn irresistibly to the Hitchcockian themes of romantic obsession and male violence, responded to the way that Herrmann’s music invokes a yearning for a prelapsarian age in which these two qualities are not fatally ...”

“... a name. In 2019, when he stood down, his would-be successor was beaten by a Conservative in Boris Johnson’s get-Brexit-done landslide. A picture from the night shows Johnson pounding the air with his fists and gurning in triumph at the Blyth result, the first time Labour had lost the seat since it was established in ...”