“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Inn Fields John Thelwall was lecturing to a much less respectable audience on Shakespeare and Dr Johnson. It has become an orthodoxy of literary history that there was a phenomenon called ‘Romantic Shakespearean criticism’, that it was a way of reading which especially emphasised character study, that it was enormously influential throughout the 19th ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and dictated defence policy long before he became premier. The entire National Government, Herbert Samuel observed, was ‘run by Neville Chamberlain. What he says goes.’ This was especially true during the abdication crisis. Chamberlain, a model of outraged provincial respectability, decided that Wallis Simpson was an absolute baggage, ‘a thoroughly ...”

“... The career of the Georgian comedian Samuel Foote is a chequered story of twists and scrapes, setbacks and rebounds, but its ending is bleak, and out of apparently lightweight materials there emerges a sort of tragedy. In theatrical lore the most famous of his setbacks was the amputation of a leg (probably his left) after a riding accident ...”

“... Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century:Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme ...”

“... were already well-advanced. ‘In splendid companies Scotch is not much heard,’ reported Samuel Johnson in Edinburgh, on his way to the Western Isles. By 1844, according to Cockburn, ‘the fashion of the Ayr world hath passed away.’ Ayr, the unsurpassable, had been surpassed. The new era of swift communications, of railways, industry and ...”

“... starting with a recognition of every accused person’s right to speak through an advocate. Samuel Johnson gave this wings: ‘As it rarely happens,’ he said to Boswell, ‘that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of ...”

“... today.PreviousNextIn 1954, the sculptor Phyllis Lambert was living in Paris when her father, Samuel Bronfman, sent her pictures of the 34-storey skyscraper he planned to build on Park Avenue in New York. Bronfman, the Canadian ‘whisky king’ who owned Seagram distillers, had commissioned Pereira & Luckman to create a gleaming metal and glass edifice ...”

“... is even a case to be made for Giles Gordon being the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s ...”

“... with Matthews), without often being read or assessed as literature. Books such as Boswell’s Johnson and Macaulay’s History once gave rise to the same apparent category error, but they have long since received the full hermeneutic treatment. So far Pepys has survived intact, greater in the public imagination than his own words. The fulfilment of this ...”

“... frugal stonemason descended of a family known for its ‘hard sayings, and hard strikings’, as a Samuel Johnson of the Scottish peasantry, a man with ‘perhaps the largest natural endowment’ of any man he ever knew. Froude reports that the way he talked of ‘the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses’, turned his son into a ...”

“... who are illogical, shrewd and kind, and nothing surprises them. Their natural kindness is what Samuel Johnson said all social goodness really is, palliative rather than radical – and in that a striking contrast to the radical, root-and-branch pain of Leontes. They do not interfere with a universe felt to be dangerously capable of looking after ...”