“... words ‘vulgar’ and ‘barbarous’. Garrick was still arousing gasps of awe as the prince, and Samuel Johnson loved the play. But neoclassical principles generally demand clear form and order, and a self-evident morality, and these are choices that Hamlet has always been able to frustrate or violate. This restricted sense of the civilised re-emerged ...”

“... journalists and printers were often the same people. It was the age of Grub Street, of Boswell and Johnson, coffee houses, clay pipes and gallons of port. In 1812 Murray II moved the firm to Albemarle Street in the more respectable West End, where it remained until the seventh John Murray sold up in 2002. Here Murray’s built a list that included some of the ...”

“... the first time that these arguments have been put forward. One notable predecessor is the American Samuel Eliot Morison, who does not figure in Grigg’s bibliography, but who delivered lectures at Oxford, and wrote in the New York Times Book Review, during 1957, in a way which foreshadowed many of the arguments in the present book. The debates about the ...”

“... the main hall of a primary school in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The pastor, Prince Yormie Johnson, became a celebrity of sorts in the early 1990s when he filmed his execution of the country’s president in the first months of what would turn out to be a brutal 14-year civil war. He has since found Jesus: ‘I am the servant of God whom He took from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”