“... B.S. Johnson died by his own hand in 1973. He was 40, and the author of seven novels, all of them rather odd in ways that put publishers off because their oddities made them expensive to produce and hard to sell. He bullied the publishers haughtily and often got his way, though at some cost to himself: the books were hard to sell ...”

“... of the post-Vietnam moment was to find a middle way between the hard militarism of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom believed they could bomb their way to victory, and the peace agenda of the Democrat George McGovern, whose dramatic failure in the 1972 presidential election convinced Holbrooke – and his future patrons the Clintons and ...”

“... are also some somewhat drab woodcuts by Kurt Craemer. There is a lively introduction by Edgar Johnson. Bulwer’s book first appeared in 1834, when the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum were the object of great interest in this country. The discovery of the buried cities was by no means new. Interesting things had been found there as early as ...”

“... Those who have much leisure to think,’ Dr Johnson wrote, ‘will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or imagined, will produce new words or combinations of words.’ The words that aren’t in a dictionary can convey nearly as much information as the words that are: the main body of the OED, which was completed in 1933, has no entry for the first word I looked up in it – ‘genocide ...”

“... and insistence finally coaxed his friend Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Life of Johnson into shape and into print. In the hands of this apparently diffident Irishman, the practice of literary history changed for ever: as far as the privileging of meticulous textual scholarship and painstaking archival research is concerned, Malone wrote the ...”

“... might arise in connection with the subtitle of James Knowlson’s new biography: ‘The Life of Samuel Beckett’. (The main title looks suspiciously like a publisher’s wheeze, a low-grade spin on Beckett’s desperate formula for the modern artist as doomed to fail or, more tantalisingly, as driven by a ‘fidelity to failure’ and the mind-bending ...”

“... to get leading appeasers – possible future Quislings – out of the country. This was why Sir Samuel Hoare was shunted off to the embassy in Madrid for the duration. It was doubtless also why Halifax was given the Washington embassy: as a sign not of Churchill’s trust but of his extreme distrust. Churchill had in any case long before established a ...”

“... Augustine here, a Bartholomew there. Reformers looked to Hebrew names from the Old Testament – Samuel, Josiah and Abigail – to signify the elect. The Puritans went further still, putting modern celebrities to shame, though I doubt Tribulation, Silence, Humiliation or Fear-God are due a comeback. But four hundred years later, I can’t think of a better ...”

“... Retitled ‘Pamela: rethinking Arcadia’, the essay appears, in a slightly different form, in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. Beer compares Sidney’s ‘directness and eroticism’ in the use of cross-dressing for seduction purposes with Richardson’s covert ‘titillation’ of the reader. Where Sidney is openly witty and unconcerned, in ...”

“... at last unlocked the puzzle and allowed me to read the full title: IOHNSON/DICKTYON/ARY. It is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. A huge, very expensive, very prestigious publication. It’s fascinating to know that Williams owned this book – and is here associating himself intellectually with Samuel Johnson, the ...”

“... moodily’: I doubt Ricks’s general notion here and wonder how it survived his transcription of Samuel Johnson’s reply to Miss Seward: ‘The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.’ Or Swift’s ‘Thoughts on Various ...”

“... believe that, having conquered Russia, he would stop there. Notable, too, was the case of Sir Samuel Hoare, sent off by Churchill to be our man in Spain as part of a wider attempt to get rid of the more notorious appeasers, but in fact a continuing blight on the anti-Nazi cause: Liddell reports that not only was he ‘a serious obstacle’ to any British ...”

“... After a series of crushing parliamentary defeats she was forced out, and replaced by Boris Johnson, who promised to exit on the planned date of 31 October whether or not there was a deal with the EU: ‘no ifs, no buts’.In the end, despite all his bluster and disregard for constitutional forms – his prorogation of Parliament, intended to scupper ...”

“... they were overthrown in a military coup in 1980 which resulted in the emergence of Master-Sergeant Samuel Doe, whose ten-year rule began with the public executions of the ousted cabinet members in full view of the international press, thus confirming the Americo-Liberians’ prejudices against the tribal populations they had treated with the contempt ...”

“... but, as Eden noted in his diary, with ‘an utter lack of moral courage’. Then came Sir Samuel Hoare, who, having promised Eden on the eve of a trip to Paris that he wouldn’t commit Laval to anything because ‘it wouldn’t be fair on my way through to my holiday,’ then proceeded, in his eagerness to get on with his hols in Switzerland, to sign ...”