“... forthright statement or explanation of the rationale of its critical method.’ I stand with Samuel Johnson in rejecting ‘the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception’.The publisher backed down, and Watt’s very good book went out into the world with its admirably modest two-page preface. Clearly, Watt was far from being a ...”

“... fill the ear with some splendid novelty than awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart’ – Samuel Johnson, who in a page or two of unanswerable analysis clarifies the reasons why a poet whom he both loved and respected could not conceal ‘the difficulty which he found in exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart’. The key word is ...”

“... and constructions of the biographer of a friend. The first is the more than a million words of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, whose first edition has been issued by Penguin in the guise of a slab of gold bullion. The second is by an admirer of Richardson’s novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady ...”

“... knew but which not many readers now know (Charles Gildon, anyone?). So Pope needs notes, and, as Samuel Johnson complained, notes refrigerate the mind by interruption, even if (as in Pope’s Dunciad Variorum) the notes are hilarious spoof scholarly annotations written by imaginary pedants about people one hasn’t heard of.But, setting aside the ...”

“... Shakespeare. The more the English bardified Shakespeare, the more their big guns fired at Ossian. Samuel Johnson harried the Highlands and directed the ordnance. Later, Shakespeare was placed at the core of the English educational system, with Burns usually nowhere to be heard. As England has grown less and less secure about its position as a stateless ...”

“... field of 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 ...”

“... that what was real was what you could smell with your own nose and feel with your own fingers. Samuel Johnson held much the same view – and if Johnson is the kind of ‘character’ the English adore, it is not only because they take a stoutly individualist delight in the idiosyncratic, but because a ...”

“... contact with Temple’s friends and admirers in high places, including the king, who according to Samuel Johnson is supposed to have taught the young secretary how to eat asparagus in the ‘Dutch’ fashion (whatever that may have been). He started writing poetry – tricky Pindaric odes in praise of statesmen he admired, through which he discovered ...”

“... The same names provide most of the substance of both books, though with varying emphases. Thus Dr Johnson is Gross’s champion, with Nietzsche the runner-up, whereas in Auden this ranking is reversed. Gross’s other seeds are Vauvenargues, Schopenhauer, Hazlitt, La Bruyère, Goethe, La Rochefoucauld, in that order; Auden has Nietzsche, ...”

“... Stepney, Fenton (Elijah) and Hughes (John): where are you now? Ten of the 52 poets represented in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets fail to make an appearance in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. On its own, of course, this doesn’t prove a thing. At the same time I would guess that these poets are known about today – if they are known ...”

“... kind of apocalyptic flail). ‘Lycidas’ is not the stilted exercise in vernacular pastoral that Samuel Johnson was to deplore and which generations of schoolchildren had reluctantly to endure as the voice of ‘classic English poetry’. It makes audible the sutures which hold together Milton’s poetic identity. So when the poet fears that death will ...”

“... and elisions haunted the rhetoric of liberalism from the beginning. ‘How is it,’ Samuel Johnson asked about secession-minded American colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John Stuart Mill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people ...”

“... fear being enslaved themselves by imperial Great Britain, a claim that drew condign derision from Samuel Johnson, among others: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ Skinner and Philip Pettit identify in resistance to enslavement a mark of the ‘neo-Roman’ theory of republican freedom. But ...”

“... agreed after the Restoration of 1660 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Local leaders such as Samuel Bamford of Middleton and John Knight of Manchester were supported by men of higher social status, such as Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, a gentleman farmer originally from Wiltshire. Hunt was politically ambitious and a populist in the old sense of the word. He ...”

“... washed up, it wouldn’t be long before the finder heard the rap of the bailiff at the door. Samuel Pepys reckoned that ‘the great profit of the lords of manors upon the sea coasts lay in wrecks.’ This was an exaggeration: as chief secretary to the Admiralty, he had a dog in the fight. But there were certainly occasional treats to be nabbed, such as ...”