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“... has its roots in the New Critics’ preoccupation with the metaphysical poets, and what Samuel Johnson called their yoking together of heterogeneous ideas by violence, but it also reflects the attitudes of someone trained to believe that bread is flesh and God. Donoghue’s main claims are that metaphor ‘invokes things disgracefully far apart’ and that ...”

“... 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 chapter called ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... whom he appeared (as Auden once succinctly put it) ‘a most bleak old bore’. The distinction of Paul Hamilton’s formidable new book, Metaromanticism, is the success with which it translates these Romantic predicaments into contemporary terms, so as to make them feel wholly up-to-date. The subject is properly convoluted and Hamilton’s prose is not shy of ...”

“... Sidney’s Arcadia was now judged frivolous, and its political content was lost to view. Dr Johnson, on reading Lycidas, was shocked to find ‘trifling fictions mingled with the most sacred and awful truths.’ The word ‘truth’ was in any case changing in usage. Renaissance poets had promised ‘truth’, but now it was widely understood to be the ...”

“... else is going on. Take the satire. In The Closed Circle it turns out that The Rotters’ Club’s Paul Trotter, who at the age of nine was a precocious admirer of Mrs Thatcher and a rabid free-marketeer, has grown up to become a New Labour MP. Spot on, perhaps, as a characterisation of the Blairite hidden agenda. But this is where the satire ends: ...”

“... In Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western Civ’ at first hand, perhaps underplays the ...”

“... His most political moment occurs in a slightly apologetic digression on the life and work of Paul de Man. As everybody knows, de Man’s most notorious wartime article argued that to tidy the Jews away somewhere – say, into ‘a Jewish colony isolated from Europe’ – would not be much of a loss to European culture; and commentators have rightly been ...”

“... here, but it is for her association with Yeats that she is now remembered. A cousin of Lionel Johnson, she was married to the much older, and apparently very dull, Hope Shakespear. Yeats met Olivia at a Yellow Book dinner in 1894. He was 29, she a couple of years older. The nervous hesitations preceding their affair, which terminated the poet’s ...”

“... the difference between friendly and unfriendly racial discrimination. To echo Justice John Paul Stevens, who in a case in 1995 pointed out the difference between a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and a welcome mat, there is certainly a moral distinction – and there should be a legal distinction – between a sign that says ‘Blacks get out!’ and one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we’ve got to pursue this further, and, Bob, I think that perhaps we could detail Alex [Alexis Johnson] and Paul [Nitze] and Tommy [Thompson] to sketch in the body of these [unclear] – and get together as a group and …’ This exchange is elusive; its exact meaning seems to hover just out of reach. Other passages are ...”

“... coming to the end of 30 days’ mess duty hope ‘that Joan Baez would sing a sweet song to Lyndon Johnson’, encouraging the President to dispatch ‘Air Force One to pick up such an intelligent, sensitive and promising young man as myself, and send me to Harvard College on a free government scholarship after a two-week vacation at Camp David’; the ...”

“... reputation as an international laundromat in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Boris Johnson, who had long cultivated ‘Londongrad’, now claimed that ‘for the oligarchs and super-rich who can afford these sky-high costs, the threat of legal action has become a new kind of lawfare. We must put a stop to its chilling effect.’ The journalists ...”

“... 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 pederasts on the ...”