“... to many: the making of English Literature. Others before have, like Brewer, figured Samuel Johnson as a hero of this story, his edition of Shakespeare rescuing the nation’s greatest writer from Neoclassical condescension, his Dictionary charting the English language in all its most literary qualities, his whole life of writing an endorsement of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the 1990s, incorporating human ...”

“... to games: exaggerating the hooligan problem allows Murdoch and club chairmen to fleece the fans. David Conn’s The Football Business is a damning analysis of commercialisation.1 His story starts at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 18 May 1992, when Sky Sports was in competition with Greg Dyke of ITV for the Premiership rights. ITV are said to have put up £262 ...”

“... not be living in Lambeth Palace and making speeches in the Lords’ (Spectator, 19 January). Boris Johnson, not one to be left behind in any hyperbole contest, told last year’s Tory Party Conference that ‘the authors of the Chequers proposal risk prosecution under the 14th-century statute of praemunire, which says that ‘no foreign court or government ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... and his text shows more than a passing resemblance to other, better, secondary sources – David Robertson’s George Mallory, Walt Unsworth’s Everest, Peter Hopkirk’s Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel’s Mystery of Mallory & Irvine. By contrast, Last Climb is not only well written, it derives authority from the ...”

“... sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world.’ Six years before Wollstonecraft was born, Samuel Johnson had remarked, at once facetiously and in earnest, on the rise of ‘a generation of Amazons of the pen, who … have set masculine tyranny at defiance, asserted their claim to the regions of science, and seem resolved to contest the usurpations of ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...”

“... same gag: ‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ As Dr Johnson said on the subject of the possibility of a post-mortem appearance among the living (he too is quoted in this remarkable book), ‘All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.’ And not just belief. History has a role as well. The ...”

“... in connecting the satire to the indignant, then furious, then maddened man who wrote it. Dr Johnson, in his 1781 Life of Swift, seemed to make official the theory that a terrible indignation finally and corrosively turned in on itself. ‘Having ... excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having, by ...”

“... marched behind not only the vice president but a statement by the most famous American general, David Petraeus, in testimony before Congress. Petraeus said that the unsolved question of Palestine was the largest ‘root’ danger to American security at home and abroad. For this resistance to Netanyahu, President Obama has been assailed in an open letter by ...”

“... a dangerous job without sanction, but that enforcing that right was tortuous.On 23 March, Boris Johnson announced a lockdown. ‘Travelling to and from work’ was permitted, he said, ‘but only where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home.’ Lawyers were immediately inundated with requests for clarification. Did he mean that the work ...”