“... the substance of the ‘lives of the poets’, a title that has little to do with Grub Street or Samuel Johnson. The favoured means of escape for Jonathan’s colleagues consists in finding an even more constricting straitjacket, a solitary cell that women cannot enter. We hear of a writer burying himself in a sub-basement padlocked from the inside, and ...”

“... abundantly said in the larger works of which it is an epigone, it at least has the advantage that Samuel Johnson commended in handbooks, of allowing you to go to the fireside and read in comfort. Given this convenience, a pursuit of etymologies is a pleasurable, skipping business, with much to reveal waywardly, not only about the quarry, the word, but ...”

“... impressed one of his Glasgow auditors, James Boswell, whose marvellous accumulation. The Life of Samuel Johnson, is a major peak in the Scottish eclectic tradition. In Edinburgh, formulating the canon of the new university study of English Literature, Blair tried to inscribe a marked Scottish presence. But works such as the Ossianic poems, Home’s ...”

“... tradition in a note Edmond Malone appended to Sonnets 92 and 93 in his 1778 ‘Supplement’ to Samuel Johnson and George Steevens’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Malone’s footnote marks a pivotal moment in the history of Shakespeare scholarship, though in more ways than Greer allows. Malone quotes William Oldys, who thought Shakespeare was ...”

“... supplementary works flooded the market. It was so embedded in the national consciousness that when Samuel Johnson gave his account of parliamentary debates in 1738, he borrowed from Swift’s lexicon, describing the ‘State of Affairs in Lilliput’. The book’s popularity continued beyond Swift’s lifetime, rivalling, as the historian J. Paul Hunter ...”

“... real imaginings (‘designs’) of the enemy.Defoe got away with it because he grovelled. In 1739, Samuel Johnson – at this point far from being a pillar of the establishment – fled to an ‘obscure’ house in Lambeth to escape arrest. His verse satire on the Walpole ministry, London, hadn’t elicited legal action the previous year, even though it ...”

“... verse treatise on sheep management, The Fleece. The essay on language centres on the views of Samuel Johnson, but the periphery takes more pages, and is concerned with Lowth, Priestley and the anonymous ‘Brightland Grammar’, works which will be not much read again. No one is going to accuse this writer of populism or of mere propaganda. In the ...”

“... a moment. The Lyttelton-Hart-Davis Letters had their origins towards the close of a dinner at the Johnson Club, attended as Hart-Davis’s guest by George Lyttelton (1883-1962), a retired Eton housemaster. Lyttelton, by then 72 and living in Suffolk, complained that no one wrote discursive letters any longer: an obsolete expression of friendship which must ...”

“... cannot say much in favour of it either. He calls it ‘this heavy hectoring poem’ and quotes Samuel Johnson, who said that Liberty’s ‘praises were condemned to harbour spiders’. Johnson, of course, held a political view very different from that of Thomson, but even ardent Whigs seem to have felt fatigued by ...”

“... figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen Heath and Stephen Bann. Samuel Johnson had moral principles, but nothing like a theory of literature: he didn’t need one. The force of English common sense is that it leaves you free to deal with the things that matter. Till recently, Johnsonian sentiments have ...”

“... another mode, there was the comic paranoia of ‘A Dream of Judgment’ (‘Posterity, thy name is Samuel Johnson’), where the Doctor delivers infallible negatives on the poet’s work – what else should a Scot expect? – and the fine satire ‘A Poem in Praise of the British’, where the tatters of Empire drift through the dreams of ‘old ...”

“... the spelling. In the middle of the 18th century, however, lexicographers became more ambitious. Samuel Johnson, uneasily aware that ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints,’ limited himself in his great dictionary to indicating stress ‘by printing an accent upon the acute or elevated syllable’. Subsequent dictionary-makers ...”

“... class and gender. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel opens with a brilliant consideration of Samuel Richardson’s career. In addition to writing three important and influential novels – which take the form of letters compiled, edited, arranged, prefaced, annotated or excerpted by an inscribed editor, and in which the appropriation and quotation of ...”

“... Invoke the authority of a central critical tradition, he was adept at echoing Arnold. Coleridge or Samuel Johnson, as he did in his assault on C.P. Snow: ‘The peculiar quality of Snow’s assurance expresses itself in a pervasive tone; a tone of which one can say that, while only genius could justify it, one cannot readily think of genius adopting ...”

“... is stuff that gets the pulse racing. The words flow. Apt phrases from T.S. Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above ...”